Admitting Defeat

Bin Laden has admitted defeat in Iraq according to the analysis at Strategy Page, and it's not looking too good for al Qaeda elsewhere in the Muslim world either. Nor is the picture particularly rosy for former Saddamites and other dead-enders:

Bin Laden doesn't discuss how the Americans defeated him. It was done with data. Years of collecting data on the bad guys paid off. Month by month, the picture of the enemy became clearer. This was literally the case, with some of the intelligence software that created visual representations of what was known of the enemy, and how reliable it was. The picture was clear enough to maneuver key enemy factions into positions that make them easier to run down.

Saddam's henchmen, the main enemy, were no dummies. They were smart enough, and resourceful enough, to build a police state apparatus that kept Saddam in power for over three decades. However, for the last three years, that talent has been applied to keeping the henchmen alive and out of jail. But three years of fighting has reduced the original 100,000 or so core Saddam thugs, to a few thousand diehards.

Three years ago, there were hundreds of thousands of allies and supporters from the Sunni minority (then, about five million people, now, less than half that), who wanted to be back in charge. Now the remaining Sunni Arabs just want to be left in peace. Thus the Sunni nationalists off in the Baghdad suburbs are shooting at, and turning in, their old allies from Saddams Baath party and secret police. This isn't easy for some of these guys, but it's seen as a matter of survival. While the fighting in and around Baghdad is officially about rooting out al Qaeda, and hard core terrorists, it's also about taking down the Baath party bankers and organizers who have been sustaining the bombers with cash, information and encouragement.

It was just a couple of months ago, wasn't it, that Harry Reid and the rest of the Dems were bewailing that the war was lost and the situation was hopeless. It may eventually turn sour, who knows, but right now Reid looks pretty silly.

Read the rest at the link.

RLC

Indoctrinate U.

A documentary on liberal bias and other forms of left-wing nuttery in the academy is soon to be forthcoming from Evan Coyne Maloney who, according to PowerLine, is:

... a skilled filmmaker who has produced lots of conservative-oriented videos. Among other things, he likes to attend far-left demonstrations and interview protesters to find out how much they understand about the issues on which they are demonstrating. The results are often illuminating.

Evan's first full-length movie, I believe, is Indoctrinate U, a documentary about liberal bias in American higher education. No serious observer doubts that such bias exists, but not everyone wants to make a record of it. Evan did, and the resulting product is spectacular....No major distributor wanted to take a chance on Evan's film, so he is going it alone, with an innovative campaign that involves internet users registering their desire to see the movie

You can visit the website and watch the trailer here. You can also sign up to express your wish to have the movie shown in your area.

RLC

Darwinian Consequences

One of the accusations most vehemently denied by Darwinian materialists is that a consistent Darwinian worldview leads logically to eugenics, racism and the holocaust. Try as they might, though, they simply cannot evade the logic of their belief that we are engaged with every other species and race in a struggle for survival. Richard Weikert brilliantly draws the connections between Darwin and the 19th century eugenicists and from these to the holocaust of the 1940s in his book From Darwin to Hitler.

Now it seems that even prominent Darwinians are acknowledging the link. Over at First Things Edward Oakes reminds us of a statement made by the great knight of the Darwinian faith, Richard Dawkins, who, in an interview he gave to an Austrian newspaper in 2005, conceded that:

"No decent person wants to live in a society that works according to Darwinian laws. . . . A Darwinian society would be a fascist state."

Ideas have consequences, and the idea that the human race is engaged in an internecine Darwinian struggle leads ineluctably to the ideas advanced by the race purifiers who advocate eugenics and elimination of unfit elements from the race.

Darwin himself wrote that some races of men were inferior to others:

"The variability or diversity of the mental faculties in men of the same race, not to mention the greater differences between the men of distinct races, is so notorious that not a word need here be said."

"Many races, some of which differ so much from each other, that they have often been ranked by naturalists as distinct species."

He also believed that the extermination of inferior races was inevitable:

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world... The break between men and his nearest allies will then be wider."

Hitler was simply applying Darwinian logic when he sought to purge from the "Master Race" all gypsies, Jews, and the mentally infirm.

The logical oucome of a consistent Darwinian worldview, combined with atheistic materialism, is Auschwitz. Indeed, ideas do have consequences.

RLC