Just look at all the intense, heated discussion about multi-culturalism, political correctness and islamofascism going on in just about every blog and forum the world over... It appears that the Nordic terrorist was looking for a way to make this debate front and center and "fuel a fire". Tragically, he concluded that a horrific large scale massacre would focus the world's attention. To that extent, he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
I know Scandinavia as a frequent traveller in 2009-2010 and I can say the sense that the society's "political correctness" and "cultural relativism" had exasperated the younger "natives" feeling like strangers in their own land was more than palpable and well above the surface. Hence the terror attack did not come as a big surprise.
I recalled the incident when I was assaulted and mugged during my first year in graduate school in the 80's. After visiting the university's student health center to get bandaged up, I was referred to a "student mental and emotional health counsellor" who began to kindly educate me about how my ordeal should be understood as a direct consequence of America's shameful history of Slavery! I think that was meant to enlighten me and at the same time help with my distress and "anger management"... But it had the exact opposite effect! I vividly remember that moment when my natural sense of disgust, focused on the retarded (possibly affirmative-action) tolerance preaching "counsellor" who could not tell from my Iranian accent that I could not possibly have anything to do with Slavery in the USA, and had only showed up to get quick outpatient treatment! The anger I felt was as intense as that which I had once felt after getting savagely beaten up by my high school's Hezbollah bullies. That was because I thought I had moved to a civilized country only to experience, first-hand, some sinister form of "education" at a rather inappropriate time! I had understood what Amercans meant by the expression "Adding Insult to Injury"!! (Afterwards some of my roommates explained "political correctness" and "affirmative action" and lent me Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" and Alan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind", two books that I read with passion and led to a revelation that liberated me from my dissonant left-liberal worldview.) I remember how I finally "got" Dirty Harry!!
The point I am trying to make is that Political Correctness can be as sinister as "Adding Insult to Injury" and I in my conversations with some of my young and intelligent Swedish and Danish friends, when they were most lucid after consuming copious doses of alcohol, I could sense the simmering anger and their intense sense of unease and loss. It was only a matter of time before a Scandinavian-style cold and calculated form of madness would overcome someone of their generation ...
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Several years ago
by oktaby on Wed Jul 27, 2011 01:04 AM PDTbefore 911, I was on a biz flight oversees and happen to have a Finnish teenager sitting next to me. Long flight so we talked andin the middle somewhere the talk turned to immigrants. He explained how he disliked the many new immigrants (mostly Paki's) who seem to be all over the place suddenly. This teenager was not racist. He was not comfortable with invasion of his culture in his homeland. Anyone who has been to Brussels, Paris...and many similar cities understands. I had a simlar conversation with a Dutch cab driver just last year. The guy has fear for his job because immigrants (specially East and south Asians and several West Africans among others) come in and s$#% all over the very thing that drew them in the first place. They take a fraction of the pay of locals and that jeopardized the lower working class in any society. This move to the right has been building for a long time and will only get stronger. Remember Wilder and a few before him. The very moslems that give no rights to anyone demand and get all kinds of rights so they can deny more. Mix that with economic downturn that is here to stay and you got a big problem on your hand. It is the big payff of globalization and it'll be glowing soon enough.
Your point about PC is quite valid.Check out Bill Joy's article (Wired, around 2000)Why the future does not need us
Oktaby
@ Choghok
by Omid Parsi on Tue Jul 26, 2011 11:15 PM PDTI am not advocating Ayn Rand to be taken literally any more than Karl Marx. They are just opposite poles, or endpoints if you will, maybe like white versus black, and the truth is "gray" somewhere in the middle. Of course as the amazing success and supremacy of American Capitalism has proven, the truth turns out to be a light shade of gray, much closer to Rand's Libertarian ideas which go way back to philosophical foundation of Capitalism and Free Enterprise as expressed by Adam Smith, Hume, Locke, etc. Ayn Rand's contribution was to convey that philosophy in fiction easily understood by common folk and stop the sugar-coated populist/collectivist propaganda from dominating the english speaking world.
Moreover, I would not judge her importance by her degree of coverage in academia which itself has been a bloated bureaucratic bastion of liberal idealism since its takeover in the 1960's. Libertarian ideas, as put into novels by Rand, have driven most of the overachieving entrepreneurs of American Capitalism (a good number of the whom, by the way, did not waste time in College!) The fact that she was not really a literary artist or the nicest person is irrelevant. In her books, it's the ideas that count and as far as the impact of her worldview on her readers, she remains the most influential and widely read author of our time.
What has made the US so special is precisely that it was built on Libertarian foundations and at key, dangerous moments in history stayed on course and never made a wide turn to the "Left". That is the gist of the "American Dream" which has enabled ambitious, hardworking people, citizens and immigrants alike, to prosper under the strict Rule of Law and Freedom from the interference of the powerful, including the State.
Anyway, I recommend you read "Fountainhead" or "Atlas Shrugged". Those books have been an antidote to erosion of work ethic and self-reliance in the English speaking world. You'll see why Americans generally want their government off their back and the electorate is not easily bought by handouts.
@Omid
by choghok on Tue Jul 26, 2011 02:21 AM PDTI must admit I have not read her books but by generally talking to people who are her followers online (not meaning you here) and also reading about her life on wikipedia and seeing a movie about her I do not hold very high expectations of her.
She fled USSR to USA and pretty much like many Iranians that have fled IRI and are now stunch IRI haters and see everything in USA good and everything about their former country bad, so was she. She helped her sister to come to USA and was expected her also to love US, but she moved back because she did not share Ayn views about US greatness, also she was isolated in her later life by her closest.
If she has had an impact as you say she had she would have been mentioned in universities and higher education, but she is not.
I am not discussing whether Iran is of ok with oil or not, I just say that she held an colonialistic elitistic world view where the stronger is always right.
Dear Omid: I think you are
by vildemose on Mon Jul 25, 2011 07:30 PM PDTDear Omid: I think you are on to something. It easy to forget sometimes.
@ vildemose: I can think of a reason for the Bias:
by Omid Parsi on Mon Jul 25, 2011 07:19 PM PDTThe Islamists are State-Sposored and disrespectful of human life as a matter of organized religion rather than a personal hatred. Also their hatred of Western Civilization is based on a centuries old conflict.
Finally the scale of the threat makes a big difference. The truth is Oklahoma City and Oslo attacks are still closer to a regular violent crimes than 9/11 or the future nuclear threat from the Islamic governments ...
@ vildemose: I can think of a reason for the Bias:
by Omid Parsi on Mon Jul 25, 2011 07:19 PM PDTThe Islamists are State-Sposored and disrespectful of human life as a matter of organized religion rather than a personal hatred. Also their hatred of Western Civilization is based on a centuries old conflict.
Finally the scale of the threat makes a big difference. The truth is Oklahoma City and Oslo attacks are still closer to a regular violent crimes than 9/11 or the future nuclear threat from the Islamic governments ...
Are right-wing terrorist less of a threat than the
by vildemose on Mon Jul 25, 2011 06:38 PM PDT"That's a question that we have to ask ourselves even more so after the Oslo Terror attack. Domestic Extremism is a growing threat to our county and our world.
But according to Gary LaFree, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START there is a rising threat from right wing groups.
right-wing Islamist terroist??
State police agencies polled by START researchers in 2008 overwhelmingly reported the presence of potentially dangerous extremist groups across the political spectrum, with nearly 90% saying neo-Nazi, skinhead, militia groups and other right-wing groups were present in their state. About two-thirds reported radical Islamic groups.
But they tended to rank Islamic terrorists as the greatest concern ahead of right-wing groups in terms of the threat posed, LaFree said.
"I think there's a little bit of perceptual bias there," he said. There have been warnings, but the push back from the right has been hard. They have even been calls for the Impeachment of Janet Neapolitano because a Department of Homeland Security (DHS)report indicated that we should be watchful of Homegrown extremists.
And
A 2010 DHS study concluded that a majority of the 86 major foiled and executed terrorist plots in the United States from 1999 to 2009 were unrelated to al-Qaeda and allied movements.
Why is there such a "perceptual bias" and does this bias affect the security of the United States?...
//www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/25/998703/-Are-Right-Wing-Extremists-more-dangerous-than-Islamic-Extremists?via=siderecent
@ choghok- What part don't you understand?!
by Omid Parsi on Mon Jul 25, 2011 05:25 PM PDTThe whole Western World is in an AntiiMuslim Sentiment?! Most of the perception of "anti-muslim" is itself the propaganda of the Politically Correct establishment, looking for a new "victim" and a "cause" to justify itself. The facts on the ground are looking on the other direction: For instance we are about to build a grand mosque pretty much at the site of the old World Trade Center in NY!
There is a lot of b.s. in public policy and and inertia in public sector bureaucracy, even in a "dynamic" democracy. By the time everyone is convinced there is a mistake, the damage has already been done and you can't put the genie back in the bottle!! Look at the growth of the US national debt and you can see with your own eyes how a free society can collectively go bankrupt despite decades of acrivism and warning by the people who "think"...
As for Ayn Rand, she was an inspiring writer known for her great achievement in stopping the onset of the collectivist philosophy and mindset through popular literature. If you could write a novel, for instance, to to stop the consumption of sugar and reverse the spread of obesity in the USA, you would be just as great. Beyond that I don't really care what she thought on Iran, and for all we know she was right. Iranians have not really "prospered" in their farcical quest for independence.
Do not understand
by choghok on Mon Jul 25, 2011 04:03 PM PDTHow did it work? The whole western world is in an antimuslim sentiment and europe in antimulticulturalism, it is also true that political correctness is held high, but still anti imigrant parties are getting power everywher in scandinavia. And accepting ayn rands theories by an Iranian is funny since she thaught that US should have invaded Iran and Iran's oil really was american and british. Nah she was as extreme as the norwegian lunatic, would not be surprised if he was reading her too.