Brutality & The New Reality: Taxi to the Darkside

One thing is for sure, a reformation in the Islamic world is much better than the destruction of the Islamic world. This weekend watching from Carlata Gall and the BBC is enlightening about the way that brutality and reality meet to form a new set of rules in the American war on terrorism. It follows that my prediction of a ham handed response to a human problem is the cause of new forms of extremism for the "terrorism industry."

It shows less incoherence in the system then you would think at first, and it is not the work of a few bad apples, and it illustrates more systemic problems within our ability to effectively manage people we do not understand or who "some nameless 'we' do not care about" and are managed for us, to quote Adolous Huxley. The film is called the "Taxi to the Dark Side" and has won critical acclaim around the world. It is a sad contrast with my humorous posts and I am posting the whole thing here for your viewing with one question, "is American Idol still so entertaining?" Make sure you send this to all your friends.

Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--GCkdWlHdk

Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFCeNOfVduY

Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmsD_7uAS8w

Part 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXxJF_ixSaA

Part 5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSwv6eF6QHo

Part 6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiZuiGNHNuo

Part 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC__qW7FDAQ

Part 8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC3rUgGOMpk

The reality of this film has affected me profoundly and it reminds

me of the 1664 persecution of Quakers; there are of course differences but they can be hard to discern during the fog of a total war strategy predicated on the idea that 9/11 changed everything, and must change us as human beings too. Such fear building techniques are less reminiscent of American political life and more reminiscent of the period just before the reign of Charles the II in Restoration England. I hope the restoration and reformation come quickly so that such deep sadness does not continue to occur here or abroad. I fear that what we win for "ourselves" by violence we will only be able to maintain with increased violence against ourselves and others.

I note with horror that in the film a taxi driver named Dilawar was killed by the Army and fear that Delaware could suffer the same fate because these details of the war of course have neither been explained to us or discussed with us as a people in an open democratic forum. It would be much better to do so to prepare the American people for changes and to explain the profound level of violence we are either willing to use or forced to use in the world.

Like others I of course will continue to advocate peace and non-extremism in all things, that includes from my own government, but the culture of "lawlessness" at one level of the executive branch has moved into other levels from the local DMV to the highest legislative offices of our state and I wish I our Governor, Senators and Congress people would work with the people to put an end to this type of arbitrary rule. Because while other states may not be good, or desire to be good, Delaware and Pennsylvania have William Penn sitting on our shoulder, and whose writings I will be publishing here soon, encouraging us to do so for the sake of all future generations.

We live in an imperfect, but it does not have to be brutal, world that is in deep need of a sense of the rule of law, the dignity of the human person and values of the enlightenment. Being tough on terrorism does not mean throwing away American values and principles- we can be better than good, we can be intelligent and good if we choose to be. This disturbing film is not for the squeamish. After you watch it you can all go back to your "American Idol" feel-goods.

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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