Fear, Islam and the Left

Watched that 7.30 Report story on Geert Wilders last night. It was terribly biased, of course. They gave a lot of prominence to some lunar leftie activists, as if they were representative to the wider population.

The little poppets were hilarious. There were shots of them drafting their placards for a demo against the Dutch politician. Being the dutiful collectivists they were, they even had to do this by committee:

HAYDEN COOPER: Ahead of the Wilders arrival in an unassuming Melbourne courtyard on Saturday afternoon, a small group of activists met to plot their protest.

ACTIVIST II: Maybe something like "Refugees are welcome, fascists are not," or, "Refugees are welcome, Geert Wilders is not," or something along those lines.

Gawd. Those poor people. They were so worried about misrepresenting the group's identity, they couldn't even come up with their own stupid slogans!

As anyone who's had anything to do with lefties knows only too well, they are terrified of being ostracised. Those who dominate such tribes know this, and use it to get what they want.

Think of what happens to scabs on the picket line, or the fate of Labor "rats". In a leftie dominated joint like Artsville, everyone is utterly terrified of transgressing the dreary PC dogmas relating to sexual identity, gender politics, climate change, and Islam to name a few. 

And I think this pervasive fear they feel is why the Left is so sympathetic to Islam (combined with that primitive belief that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", of course).

As Wilders says about Islam:

In the Islamic world, I was always struck by two things. I was impressed by the kindness and helpfulness of many people. But there was also their fear. Islamic societies are ruled by terror. Muslims are good people, but they live under the yoke of Islamic sharia. If they leave Islam, or even just mildly criticise it, they sign their own death verdict.

Contrary to what many Westerners think, Islam, rather than a religion, is a totalitarian political ideology. It is an ideology because it aims for an Islamic state and wants to impose sharia on all of us. It is totalitarian because it is not voluntary: once you are in, you cannot get out. Unlike genuine religions, Islam also makes demands on non-Muslims. We, too, are marked for death if we criticise it.

You could use a lot of those phrases to describe politically correct leftism. Sure, you're not gonna get your head cut off live on the internet for making some off colour gay joke at a plonk-sodden fringe festival shindig. But doing so could result in you being marked as One Who Does Not Obey, and mean that you'd suffer severely both personally and professionally.

Lefties know fear. They get fear. They are comfortable with fear. So it's easy to understand why they find what Wilders has to say so threatening. He wants societies that are free from fear, after all. 

Fear of nuclear catastrophe in Japan is like fear of climate change

If you're a half-way rational person, I'll bet you're struck by the strange priorities of most media outlets in their reporting of the quake and tsunami disaster in Japan. The fixation on the nuclear angle is weird as.

Sure, it's scary, with all these explosions occurring as a result of the quake. But as many have pointed out, it's nowhere near as serious as what has already occurred in that nation. Many thousands of people have died horribly in a natural disaster, yet there's a greater media focus on what might happen as a consequence of the nuclear reactors exploding.

This is sooo like climate change. People are more worried about imaginary problems in the future than they are about very real ones now.

I think this just says something about human nature generally. That is, that fear is often deeply irrational. (Well, it's likely it would be -- it's an emotion, after all! Perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that it often results from irrational perceptions.)

The other element in this weird mix is the crazy idea that nature is always good, and mankind is inevitably bad. This is very clearly demonstrated in this nuke fear, as well as climate change hysteria. In the latter condition carbon dioxide is all fine and dandy if it comes from natural processes, and baaad if it's produced by humans. Hell, it's even given a different, more eeevil-sounding name if that happens: carbon.