Bret Stephens doesn't quite say it, but this is how empires end.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000...63792176404133
0.html

The Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2010.

Joe Gwinn

On Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:04:44 -0500, Joseph Gwinn
wrote:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000...63792176404133
0.html


When does a civilization become incompetent? I've been mulling the
question in a number of contexts over the last year, including our
inability to put a stop to Somali piracy, detain a terrorist who can
neither be charged nor released, think rationally about climate change,
or rebuild Ground Zero in an acceptable time frame.

But the question came to me again in Brussels on Sunday as I watched my
children—ages six, four, and four months—get patted down before boarding
our U.S.-bound flight. The larger-than-allowed bottle of cough syrup in
my carry-on, however, somehow escaped our screener's humorless
attentions.

Yes, the screener in this case was Belgian, not American. Yes,
terrorists come in any number of skin colors, and they aren't above
strapping explosives to their own children. And yes, the Obama
administration took a half-step toward sanity by ordering additional
screening of passengers from 14 countries, including Yemen, Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, home of Flight 253 would-be bomber Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab.

But here's a predictive certainty: Not one non-Muslim from any of these
countries (or others such as Egypt or Jordan, which were oddly excluded
from the list) will ever become a suicide bomber. The localized case of
Sri Lanka's Tamils aside, suicide bombing is a purely Islamic
phenomenon. Note that during the whole of the intifada there was not a
single case of a Palestinian Christian blowing himself up, making a
nonsense of the view that Israel's checkpoints and curfews and security
fences were the main cause of the terror.

So as Homeland Security, TSA and the rest of the government's
counterterrorism apparatus struggle to upgrade travel security in a way
that doesn't involve freeze-drying passengers in their seats, it's worth
noting that we have finally reached the outer bounds of a politically
correct approach to airport security. To wit, the U.S. government is now
going to profile Muslim passengers, albeit partially, indirectly and via
the euphemism of nationality instead of religion. Insofar as actual
security is concerned, it would be both more honest and effective if it
dropped the remaining pretense.

The obvious rub is that profiling goes against the American grain. We
shudder at the memory of previous instances of it, particularly the
internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s. Rightly so.

But a civilization becomes incompetent not only when it fails to learn
the lessons of its past, but also when it becomes crippled by them.
Modern Germany, to pick an example, has learned from its Nazi past to
eschew chauvinism and militarism. So far, so good. But today's
Multikulti Germany, with its negative birth rate, bloated welfare state
and pacifist and ecological obsessions is a dismal rejoinder to its own
history. It is conceivable that within a century Germans may actually
loathe themselves out of existence.

In the U.S., our civilizational incompetence takes various forms. For
instance: No country in the world collects more extensive statistical
data about its own population than the U.S. And no country is as
conflicted about the uses to which that data may or may not be put than
the U.S. So what exactly is the point of all this measuring, collating
and parsing?

Our deeper incompetence stems from an inability to recognize the proper
limits to our own virtues; to forget, as Aristotle cautioned, that even
good things "bring harm to many people; for before now men have been
undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their
courage."

Thus we reject profiling on the commendable grounds that human beings
ought not to be treated as statistical probabilities. But at some point,
the failure to profile puts innocent lives recklessly at risk. We also
abhor waterboarding for the eminently decent reason that it borders on
torture. But there are worse things than waterboarding—like allowing
another 9/11 to unfold because we recoil at the means necessary to
prevent it. Similarly, there are worse things than Guantanamo—like
releasing terrorists to Yemen so they can murder and maim again (and so
we can hope to take them out for good in a "clean" Predator missile
strike).

Put simply, we do not acquit ourselves morally by trying to abstain from
a choice of evils. We just allow the nearest evil to make the choice for
us.

And so it goes. We can be proud of how deeply we mourn the losses of
troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. But a nation that mourns too deeply
ultimately becomes incapable of conducting a war of any description,
whether for honor, interest or survival. We rightly care about the
environment. But our neurotic obsession with carbon betrays an inability
to distinguish between pollution and the stuff of life itself. We are a
country of standards and laws. Yet we are moving perilously in the
direction of abolishing notions of discretion and judgment.

One of life's paradoxes is that we are as often undone by our virtues as
by our vices. And so it is with civilizations, ours not least.

Write to


"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the
means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not
making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of
it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different
countries, that the more public provisions were made for the
poor the less they provided for themselves, and of course became
poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the
more they did for themselves, and became richer." -- Benjamin
Franklin, /The Encouragement of Idleness/, 1766

I completely agree....we, the current US generation, do not deserve the nation we inherited....shame on us.
Steve

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message ...
Bret Stephens doesn't quite say it, but this is how empires end.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000...63792176404133
0.html

The Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2010.

Joe Gwinn

"Steve Lusardi" wrote:

I completely agree....we, the current US generation, do not deserve the nation we inherited....shame on us.


I'm going to disagree. I have spent my time in the military on my own behest and have
held elected office. If I can make it to retirement, I'm not done doing my bit.

As for the majority of people that have no clue that being involved into how one's
country, state, county, city, and HOA is governed, well they do deserve whatever they get.

Wes
--
"Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect
government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home
in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller

"Wes" wrote in message
...
"Steve Lusardi" wrote:

I completely agree....we, the current US generation, do not deserve the
nation we inherited....shame on us.


I'm going to disagree. I have spent my time in the military on my own
behest and have
held elected office. If I can make it to retirement, I'm not done doing
my bit.

As for the majority of people that have no clue that being involved into
how one's
country, state, county, city, and HOA is governed, well they do deserve
whatever they get.

Yeah, but there is a such thing as the tyranny of the majority, and when the
majority is self-obsessed illitirit assholes addicted to realityTV, video
games, and celebrity/sports worship, who then enable our social and
political deterioration, we, the undeserving of this downward spiral, get
caught up, as sure as if we were in the middle of a stadium stampede.
How do you escape? Well, proly only by getting rich/affluent, and how easy
is dat?

See my post on TV which is 31% commercials -- may seem like a trivial point,
but it's symbolically important, and just the tip of the iceberg..
--
EA


Wes
--
"Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect
government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home
in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller

Existential Angst wrote:
"Wes" wrote in message
...
"Steve Lusardi" wrote:

I completely agree....we, the current US generation, do not deserve the
nation we inherited....shame on us.

I'm going to disagree. I have spent my time in the military on my own
behest and have
held elected office. If I can make it to retirement, I'm not done doing
my bit.

As for the majority of people that have no clue that being involved into
how one's
country, state, county, city, and HOA is governed, well they do deserve
whatever they get.

Yeah, but there is a such thing as the tyranny of the majority, and when the
majority is self-obsessed illitirit assholes addicted to realityTV, video
games, and celebrity/sports worship, who then enable our social and
political deterioration, we, the undeserving of this downward spiral, get
caught up, as sure as if we were in the middle of a stadium stampede.
How do you escape? Well, proly only by getting rich/affluent, and how easy
is dat?

See my post on TV which is 31% commercials -- may seem like a trivial point,
but it's symbolically important, and just the tip of the iceberg..



Believe it or not, there is no legal compulsion to watch TV.

Turn the damned thing OFF. (you are allowed to do that).

I _suspect_ that most of the angst in this news group is caused by TV.

But this ain't your Grandpa's television programming.
It's "in yer face", "down yer throat", ratings driven drivel.
It's not good for any of us.

Turn It Off.

--

Richard Lamb
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~cavelamb/


"The clock of life is wound but once, and no man has the power
to tell just when the hands will stop, at late or early hour...
Now is the only time you own. Live, love, toil with a will.
Place no faith in time. For the clock may soon be still."