ESR's Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto

[MaggieL]

Found this very interesting, well-written, and representative of a lot of my own feelings. I'm awaiting a reply from ESR as to what distribution terms he'd like to impose, but surely linking (click the button below) to an offered permalink is fair use....even if it is a bookmark to the top page of the site.

<div align=center> <a href="http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_10_27_armedndangerous_archive.html#83695716"><img name="aim" width=100 height=40 border=0 src="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/graphics/aim-off.png" onMouseover='this.src="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/graphics/aim-on.png"' onMouseout='this.src="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/graphics/aim-off.png"' alt="Click to Read" title="Click to Read"/></a></div>

[MaggieL]

Got distribution permission.
<h3>Why We Fight &mdash; An Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto</h3><p>WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers, politicians, and activists operating within conventional political categories;</p><p>WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of evil for the act of evil;</p><p>WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist' measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;</p><p>WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war back to the aggressors <emphasis>is</emphasis> our only practical instrument of self-defense;</p><p>WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the premises of the anti-idiotarian position:</p><ol><li><p>THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the hands of terrorists by rogue states;</p></li><li><p>THAT the terrorists and their state sponsors have declared and are pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but against its core virtues: against the freedom of thought and speech and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the qualities which separate civilized human beings from savagery, slavery, and fanaticism;</p> <li><p>THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty, are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;</p></li> <li><p>THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam and shari'a law on the kaffir West;</p></li> <li><p>THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we underestimated the scope of their future malice even <em>without</em> weapons of mass destruction;</p></li> <li><p>THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working towards the development and delivery of weapons of that would multiply the terrorists' ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;</p></li><li><p>THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamist terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.</p></li> </ol><p>WE THEREFORE DECLARE that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of mankind, to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.</p><p>WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause' of Islamo-fascist terrorism lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of the war against terror must be to displace and discredit those animating ideas.</p><p>WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free speech, or the right of peacable assembly, or the right to bear arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level surveillance of public areas;<p>IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject the alternative of ceding to the world's barbarians the exclusive privilege of force;</p><p>WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members of the Islamo-fascist terror network;<p>WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.</p><p>WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police cannot and <em>should</em> not be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the ordinary citizen's right and duty to respond to terrorist aggression with effective force.</p><p>WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible overthrow of the governments of Iraq and of other nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction; and the occupation of those nations until such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their societies.</p><p>WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion <emp>within</em> the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and tyrants operating outside it.</p><p>WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left &mdash; the moral blindness that refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place than any culture in which jihad, 'honor killings', and female genital mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.</p><p>WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right &mdash; whether it manifests as head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a a Christian-chauvinist political agenda that echoes the religious absolutism of our enemies.</p> <p>WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds.</p> <p>WE HAVE AWAKENED; we have seen the face of evil in the acts of the Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much to enable and excuse their evil. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that evil.</p><p>WE SHALL DEMAND as citizens and voters that those we delegate to lead pursue the war against terror with an unflagging will to victory and all means necessary &mdash; while remaining always mindful that we must not become what we fight;</p><p>WE SHALL REMEMBER that the West's keenest weapons are reason and the truth; that we must shine a pitiless light on the lies from which terrorist hatred is built; and that we must also be vigilant against the expedient lie from our own side, lest our victories become tainted and hollow, sowing trouble for the future.</p><p>WE HAVE FAITH that we are equal to these challenges; we shall not be paralyzed by fear of the enemy, nor yet by fear of ourselves;</p><p>WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we <em>shall</em> defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our wealth and freedoms to win their women and children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the face of the Earth.</p><p>THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by terrorism and rogue states:</p> <p>YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.</p>
Eric S. Raymond&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br />
2 November 2002&nbsp;&nbsp;<br />
<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/aim/support.html">(Your signature here)</a><hr><small>
<p>&copy;2002 by Eric S. Raymond. Link freely, print rights are reserved.</p><p>You can also read <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/aim/background.html">background information</a> on the manifesto.</p>
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[jaguar]

Well, that was a badly thought out shallow analysis full of sweeping generalisations in a format that requires far more definition lacking both forethought and factual basis. I want two minutes of my life back i just wasted reading that pile of trash.

[Nic Name]

That's enough vituperation outa you.

[jaguar]

Quite restrained actually. The temptation for a 3 page diatribe was overridden by the nagging feeling of a psychology exam on thursday.

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by jaguar
I want two minutes of my life back i just wasted reading that pile of trash.

Just consider it a "minority report".

I figured you''d love it. Glad you didn't bother to respond in detail, since I'm planning to ignore three-page diatribes anyway. Even though you're busy, I know we'll see two or three others.

"Reflexive anti-Amercanism" is <i>le mot juste</i> for so much of what shows up here from certain quarters. "The idiotarianism of the Left...apologists for terrorist acts, propounding squalid theories of moral equivalence....vacuity and moral confusion...."

"[We] reject the alternative of ceding to the world's barbarians the exclusive privilege of force.....meeting a distributed threat with a distributed response" Right on the money.

Interestingly enough, we don't see too much of "the idiotarianism of the Right" here on The Cellar, although Goddess knows there's plenty of it elsewhere. I'm expecting a few three-page diatribes there too, where there will be equally bad spelling but much worse grammar. :-)

[jaguar]

Brilliant idea, lets sterotype every poition on both side of politics into two extremes and claim to be the sole voice of sanity. Such insight and depth of understanding is no better than any of the positions it attacks, and takes some of the worst points of both in the process, tata for this thread.

Stereotypes are funny, alligator wrestler.

[jaguar]

I agree, problem is i think this thing is meant to be serious

[elSicomoro]

Originally posted by jaguar
Brilliant idea, lets sterotype every poition on both side of politics into two extremes and claim to be the sole voice of sanity.

I'm the one TRUE voice of sanity...the rest of you need to pack your bags and go home. Thanks.

[jaguar]

No i am!

[Undertoad]

This is an attempt to seed a new cohesive political position on foreign affairs in a country that hasn't had to do so very often. It is to figure out and/or signal whether there is enough agreement to take the movement further.

So if you don't agree with the movement, of course you'll find it silly and stereotypical. By the time you've gotten to understanding what it's talking about, you are in disagreement with it at a very high level.

I felt that the term "idiotarian" was a non-starter, but after I thought about it for a while, I figured it had some kind of viral marketing value. It's terrible form to define yourself by who your political opposite is, and terrible form again to define yourself via an insult. For the purpose of serious discussion of issues, it's totally wrong to start by being insulting. But that's what makes it viral, too; it expresses how serious the matter is, how serious the believers are, etc.

Hey, it's the 2000s, and people are always up in your face to make a point. This is just what you have to do to get attention.

The problem is if it gets too directly insulting, if a serious discussion of issues isn't allowed afterwards, etc. Empty invective doesn't go very far.

[jaguar]

But it is not a new policy. It is a mix of mostly hawkish opinions without the stuff that annoys the libertarians while condemning both sides of mainstream politics for their extremes. There is nothing new, nothing interesting, and nothing of real value. It also is a very superficial analysis of the situation, taking only the most obvious facts and symptoms without looking at the causes or underlying reasons before deciding a course of action designed to solve the problem in the long term without understanding the implications of asymmetrical warfare on traditional defense policy and mentalities. Thus the course of action addresses the symptoms in an incomplete way without facing some of the harder facets of the problem and does nothing to alleviate the underlying issues that have played a signifigant role in the rise of the problem let alone suggest (and i admit this is the signifigantly more challanging issue) methods by which the root causes of islamic terrorism can be erradicated.

For a 'manifesto' its also lacking definitions of key terms which makes it deeply inarticulate adding to the fundamental problems that already exist. In fact the only definition is that of IDIOTARIANISM, which according to their definition attempts to reinvent the wheel with a grammatical abomination. The fact it defines itself by what it opposes rather than what it stands for is telling in the extreme. The only good thing about is it is not guilty of the circumlocution that many similar documents are rife with, sadly this is not due to good writing or reasoning.

It’s knee-jerk in point form. I hope UT, that explains why it’s silly.

[Skunks]

I agree that current political figureheads aren't doing particularly well, but that's about it. The thought of having citizens fighting back against terrorism is quite disconcerting, as I have seen little to inspire trust in humanity.

Also, er...how does one uphold the American ideals--freedom, namely--while running around killing people primarily because of their religion?

Call me a sissy, but I'd much rather remove the motivation than the means. Regardless of how many armed maniacs you kill, there'll always be more.

--Sk

[jaguar]

There is a word for people like you skunk.
Rational.