In Egypt, what Hussein Ibish calls “accommodation” would for Islamists, as well as for the felool, equate with capitulation, under the longer term prospect of extinction. This prospect is deemed intolerable, just as the proposed or traditional “accommodations” of liberal or other minority aspirations under Islamist or nationalist-authoritarian regimes may be perceived as intolerable to those “accommodated.”
The victory as victory is thought to prove – for an American it is after the victory obligatory to accept as proven – that the realization of this authentic integrative essence was always in prospect from the beginning of the nation, that its realization must have been inevitable.
So, anyway maybe we or anyway I, whatever that is, will see about erring on the side of the with-saying, for a change, for a while, God or gods or fates or nothing willing or allowing.
Because liberal democracy must fail the Few Good Men test, and is committed to fail it forever and ever, we require of our leaders not merely that they lie, but that they do not even admit to the possibility of their and our shared commitment to falsehoods and blindness.
As long as the liberal-seculars and the Islamists in Egypt view their belief systems as mutually exclusive except under the ultimate and effectively permanent neutralization of the adversary – as long as each sees the other as evil – the decision between them will be determined as a matter of the violent conversion of the errant believer that is for each held to be a foundational impossibility, so must develop under a mutually external power or authority. The connection might otherwise be a beginning point, an at least half-shared location of the sacred, if it did not remain invisible amidst the teargas, and unheard among the shouting. It will still be there, nowhere, whoever happens to be declared the winner.
“Counterfactual certitude fallacy” would be a corollary of historical fallacy, as in any claim of certainty that a simple alteration of a particular fatal decision would have necessarily led to an on-balance better course of subsequent events.
Liberalism is the ideology that turns what the non-liberal wants into its opposite, then insists that he acknowledge no difference.
I suppose I may be faulted for being too naively forgiving toward Huckabee, but I find Williams’ attack on him to be both excessive and un-serious.
The country of mutually supportive consumerism and militarism is the country that sells (or did sell until last week) Bushmaster rifles at Wal-Mart for the gun-loving consumer. That country is the same country that spends and makes billions producing and promoting the eternal arsenal of democracy; is the same country that is called upon or calls upon itself to provide globe-spanning security for itself and imitators; is the country that via nuclear weapons held the entire world hostage on behalf of its “way of life”; and is the same country that also invests and returns billions producing and promoting the likes of Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed – and two, three, many more sequels each. Maybe it is all coincidence, or maybe we Americans kill with guns at obscenely high rates because, for complex reasons, we have become or remain highly proficient killers, possibly the world’s experts on killing or at least on certain means and methods.
