Silence and All That Shit

Silence and All That Shit

Silence in the face of cheap taunts and provocations from stupid, ignorant, and insecure assholes and douche bags indicates real strength. A real man speaks what he has to and then he just moves on. Too much sound and fury is a reflection of weakness, and strength. Speech is a precious gift. Use it wisely. A man is strong indeed when he's of a few words. 

Life isn't about finding your limits; it's about recognizing the limitations of your imagination. Man is only restricted by his imagination. All human achievements have been born of imagination and wishes. 

People often look at you skeptically after they ask you who you are and receive a reply delivered in a rich baritone voice that you are a writer, a lover of words and languages, a financial and verbal gladiator, a philosopher, and a humble but occasionally arrogant truth-seeker. Then you go for the jugular, yes, you happen to think of yourself very endowed in metaphysics and vastly superior to most men and women you have met in terms of intelligence and intellect. 

About twenty years ago, you chanced to meet a guy at a bar. He asked you where you were from and what kind of work that you did and all those sundry ice breakers employed when we meet strangers but want to carry on a conversation. Apparently, you made quite an impression on the guy because he commented that you spoke English far better than most of the natives and that your sentences flowed in a coherent pattern like paragraphs in an essay. He asked you where you had gone to school and how come your English was so good. You self-deprecatingly  said that you couldn't get rid of the foreign accent in your voice. He looked at you in the eye and said that Kissinger couldn't get rid of his accent either. He then disclosed that he was a professor teaching Cognitive Science. He and you then moved on discussing the process of language acquisition and the functioning of the brain. 

Whenever you feel down or misunderstood or homicidal, you always turn to that chance encounter in the bar to lift you up from the funk you find yourself in. 

Recently you came across an arresting sentence, “We must push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.” This sentence reflects your intellectual journey. 

Your recent interfacing wth certain assholes have brought to the fore the following insights:

1. Man has the basic needs of survival and procreation. 

2. And then because he is a social mammal, he needs respect and he craves for power. Very few humans are good enough to go after scientific or artistic self-actualization. The majority of them are stuck with the pursuit of power, big or small, and a sense of significance, whether they deserve them or not. 

3. Thus, most of them live in fear of feeling small, stupid, and unaccomplished. So they defend their fragile, eggshell egos with naked lies and sound and fury, instead of real achievements. TamiKaKa and Paul Van are prime examples of these simian humans. But since they are lazy and not terribly smart, they do NOT realize that the only fears they must have are Fear of Death, Fear of Loss of Self-Respect, and Fear of Failure. For certain men of exceptional pride, Fear of Death pales in comparison with Fear of Loss of Self-Respect and Fear of Failure. With these men, facts and truths are vastly superior to wishful thinking  born of superstition, and masturbatory and bloodless dreams.

Of course, you happen to think of yourself as part of the elite group of humans with exceptional true pride. That's why you have worked your ass off to improve your body and mind. That's why you fucking despise rodents like TamiKaKa and Paul Van and have a strong conviction that these two motherfuckers along with their brethren like Veronique Thuy Huong and Lông Chó Vũ should be thrown into an industrial steel-making  furnace and burned to ashes. When you hold this kind of conviction, you have glimpses of the workings of the minds of Hitler and ISIS leaders and their ardent, compliant followers. 

Man is a sick, strange animal, indeed. Mess with his ego, and a steep price must be paid. Man doesn't live by bread alone. Alone in the animal kingdom, he kills and dies for Ego and Ideas. That's why you've tried to practice stoned-face Silence and Breath Control.  You are accumulating Energy for a your Judgement Day, your own festival of settling scores and unleashing a stream of blood. There must be a reason why Red is regarded the color of Passion. It's the color of Blood and Death. Roberto Wissai, you must learn to keep your mouth shut amid noise and cacophony, nonsense and stupidity. Killing is fucking easy; the hard part is dealing with the consequences. 

Theorizing, based on common sense and imagination, instead of facts and information, no matter how incomplete the facts and information are, is stupid, intellectually dishonest, and dangerous. 

There's been an explosion of books about modern cosmology lately. Read at least one book, then read The Vital Questionby Nick Lane. After reading those books and the article with the subject title Ultimate Fate of the Universe in Wikipedia, and you still believe in a Personal God with Whom Jesus of Nazareth was somehow connected, then sadly you are doomed to the la-la-Land of Make-Believe. 

There have always been two types of modern humans on this planet:

1. Those who are intellectually vigorous, curious, and honest; and emotionally strong and independent. They care about facts and truths. All the knowledge acquired by modern humans to this day has been generated by the people in this group. They are the cream of the human species and have always been in the minority. 

2. Those who are intellectually lazy, moronic, and dishonest; and emotionally childish, dependent, and slavish. They are fearful of facts and truths. They enthusiastically embrace everything they are told by their religious and political leaders. They believe to the letter the Bible. They are Donald Trump supporters and see him as a "leader" and an agent of change, and not as a fraud and a demagogue. In my views, these humans are barely a step above monkeys in terms of evolutionary development because they cannot think in a dispassionate manner. They are all passion and very small brain. 

By the way, TamiKaKa Ito, nick of Nguyễn Mạnh Phúc, is a prime example of this type of deplorable, pitiful humans. This ignorant, envious, and stupid dude "thinks " with his dick and speaks through his ass.

One of the pleasures you have in life is to read how stupid and ignorant folks opine about politics and religion.   Most humans are stupid, superstitious, vain, insecure, and worthy of being exterminated, especially the insolent, the loud-mouthed, and the sarcastic. Whenever you see an ugly, fat, loud-mouthed simian monkey with shifty eyes and incoherent, stupid, uninformed opinions, you feel blessed. 

You have an irrepressible ego, but strangely enough you don't have a burning yearning for a thundering, rapturous acclaim. You are content to be who you are. 

There is some truth in a line written by Shakespeare, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks" Guilt and insecurity manifest themselves unconsciously. Very few guilty people can be always cool. It's very common to ascribe to others what we feel most uncomfortable about ourselves. Thus, drunks often laugh at alcoholics; fat folks make fun of heavy people; assholes who accomplish nothing with their lives talk about others' failures; lousy native speakers of English ridicule the English of newly arrived immigrants. Man is a strange, insecure mammal, indeed. He is often not comfortable around those who are clearly to him in intelligence, intellect, and looks. He must find ways to bring those down to his level or below so he can feel good about himself. Inferiority complex is a heavy burden to bear so he tries to act superior, whether he is truly superior to others or not. Human animals like these deserve to be burned up like thrash and garbage. Their ashes would be then mixed with fertilizers to enrich the soil. 

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(To be continued) 

Big, Bad, Bold and Beautiful Braggadocios

Big, Bad, Bold and Beautiful Braggadocios 

Henry Miller’s close friend, British author Lawrence Durrell, was not pleased at all with Sexus. In a letter dated September 5, 1949, he wrote that Miller was lost "in this shower of lavatory filth which no longer seems tonic and bracing, but just excrementitious and sad."

"I am trying to reproduce in words a block of my life which to me has the utmost significance – every bit of it," Miller responded. "Since 1927 I have carried inside me the material of this book. Do you suppose it's possible that I could have a miscarriage after such a period of gestation? ... But Larry, I can never go back on what I've written. If it was not good, it was true; if it was not artistic, it was sincere; if it was in bad taste, it was on the side of life."

Yes, the above exchange of the two writers has had an effect on you, an aspiring writer. You celebrate the magic of words properly employed. You are on the side of life, this side of paradise. 

You recall the words of Nietzsche in his Ecce Homo (How One Becomes What One Is). It is an unique autobiography, the likes of which didn't appear before or have not appeared since its publication.  By being carefree and intentionally antagonistic and provocative, Nietzsche supersedes the conventions of the genre. He is in your face, shouting and screaming and stretching his views to combative and poetic extremes. His life is that of an artistic and philosophical anti-hero whose life is a self-conscious, painful, and lonely journey of self-transcending. The preceding sentence is also an apt description of yourself. 

If you have to brag, brag like Nietzsche, boldly and with no reservation. You must be convinced of your own greatness. And fuck false social conventions of modesty and moderation while you're bragging. With Nietzsche, Excess is good. Nothing exceeds and succeeds like Excess. You scream until you can scream no more and the remainder of your life is confined and condemned to silence, a fitting conclusion to a solitary man. 

Yes, a mad man is not necessarily a stupid man. He could be just different and ahead of his times. He looks around him and he laughs. The world is indeed peopled more by monkeys than real men. Only monkeys would believe in a God and an Afterlife. Only monkeys would be vain and stupid and fearful of truths and guilty of self-projections. 

When you interact with folks on the Net, you realize that most of them are so fucking dumb and ignorant that the situation is pathetic and laughable when these motherfuckers don't know how to keep their stupid mouths shut. As monkeys and dogs, they must holler and bark. Yet some of them in stupid fits of anger and rationalization, dismiss others as "stupid failures". Now you understand why Hitter was into genocide and eugenics. Man is a stupid but vain animal, deserving both contempt and wariness. The moment you view humans strictly in animal terms, you know your alienation from them is total and complete. You are no longer in flight from them. To you, they don't even exist as real humans. They are sub-humans to you. If you could, you would expedite their departure from this world; you would put an end to their useless, subhuman, despicable, miserable existence. 

On the way to work this afternoon, an NPR interview of a professor of philosophy reinforced what you have known about consciousness and your own thinking of what a gifted human you are in the areas of metaphysics and consciousness. Either a human knows about these areas or his mind is shut off, blocked off from understanding these matters and has to resort to the crutch called "God" to explain the mysteries of the  Universe and Human Existence.

Far into the night, lying in bed and listening to Latin American music on Pandora makes him get in touch with some of the sublime aspects of being human: language and music. 

You told a new friend that you don't subscribe to the common adage that the Self is abominable. The Self is what it is. Only when we excessively glorify or denigrate it does it become a problem. We all need to be honest to ourselves and others. We have to come to terms with who we are. Of course we have to improve ourselves to be a better person in all aspects-intellectually, morally, emotionally and physically, but we must never run away from who we are by falsely presenting ourselves to the world. But all assholes in this world do exactly that. TamiKaKa, the lying and envious motherfucker, is a prime example. This douche bag is an intellectual fraud. This scumbag is pure garbage, deserving to be exterminated like a rabies-carrying rodent.

In this world, there are many humans that behave worse than beasts in the jungle and barnyard animals. You have met many of them. 

The more you live and interact with the two-legged beasts called humans, the more you are convinced of your superiority in the areas of philosophy, religion, and language. And you can't stand loud and persistent dumb asses which, not who, make stupid, meaningless, and pathetic noises when they open their mouths to speak. These motherfuckers think they can fool others with the noises they make. 

Jeff Goldblum in an interview conducted by Esquire magazine in the July 2016 issue articulated so many thoughts that eerily resemble yours, especially when he said that he was a late bloomer. Like him, things have got startlingly clear to you since you turned sixty. You don't really have strong regrets over how your life has turned out. You are taking full responsibility for all your actions and acts of omission. You are learning more about you, the dark, hidden recesses of your mind, and what really turns you on and what turns you off. 

Life, to you, is a nonstop adjustment of your thinking based on facts happening around and to you. You don't impose your theory/model/mode of interpretation on facts. Rather, you use facts to build and modify your theory. That's why you have arrived at the following tentative conclusions:

1. There is no God. A man's values and attitudes are determined from this important departure. Man is alone, doomed to die and returned to Nothingness. 

2. Love is hard work, requiring an emotional and social maturity and how a man has been treated. You have made many, many mistakes in this endeavor. 

Nobody loves you more than your mother and maybe yourself. 

To be loved, one must make oneself lovable. That's a law. 

By all means, fall in love over and over again, but be very careful every single time. Most humans are not what and who they seem to be. 

3. Most humans (80%) are assholes and scumbags. Out of that, around 40%, deserve to be exterminated like vermin. 

4. Politics is all about power. One must have power to do good on s large scale. 

5. You can tell about the essence of a man by the way he handles money. Is he generous, fair, or fucking stingy? 

6. Lying is mostly cowardice. Sometimes it reflects wisdom. 

7. Never, ever give up. Try and try again. Persevere in doing what you think is right. 

8. Sex is overrated. Love is not. How a man has sex reflects his dark, primitive self. You can love without sex, but a sex without love while temporarily satisfying leaves a man empty and lonely and unconnected afterwards. 

9. Respect Silence. Speak only what is true, nice, and comforting. 

10. Learn to forfeit, forgive, and forget. Most humans are not quite human. They are still chimps. By all means, feel superior to those you despise and loathe. That will help you keep your mouth shut. No sane man wants to have a dialogue with a scumbag. It takes strength to ignore taunts and provocations. But then when a silent man acts, it is all bloodshed and pure violence. Trump is a piece of human trash: insecure and blustering. Obama is more developed on the evolutionary path. Trump is pretty much a chimp, a smart chip but still a chimp whereas Obama is a real human in both appearance and soul. Those who hate and despise Obama need to confront who they really are. Sometimes what and whom we hate reflects what and who we really are. 

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A book review done by Lee Child

Photo

Gen. Solomon Mujuru, a.k.a. Rex Nhongo, at a military review in Zimbabwe in 1981. CreditAssociated Press 

THE DEATH OF REX NHONGO
By C.B. George
311 pp. A Lee Boudreaux Book/Little, Brown & Company. $26.

I was fascinated by this novel. By its supple, subtle, multi-stranded narrative, certainly, and by its accomplished technique, but also by a minor inside-baseball mystery that ultimately became a bonus strand in my reading: Who wrote it? The book is credited to “C.B. George,” who, we are told, “spent many years working throughout southern Africa.” We are further told that “he now lives in London.” Yet he has no apparent history as a writer, and no claim is made that this is a debut work. Indeed, it would be astonishing if it were — like being able to play the “Moonlight” Sonata with no prior experience of the piano. Therefore “C.B. George” must be a pen name, and speculating about who — or, more accurately, what kind of established writer — lies behind it became a matter of ongoing interest, illuminated by what I took to be clues scattered throughout the text.

The novel is set in contemporary Zimbabwe, that landlocked and luckless country in the southeast of Africa. Its modern history began in the late 19th century when the British came calling, not at first for the greater glory of Queen Victoria but for gold and diamonds. A well-bred scuffler named Cecil Rhodes got the ball rolling. Later the country was named Rhodesia in his honor, and like Kenya to the north, it attracted second sons and second-chancers and second-raters from all over Britain to a new and classically colonial life. As an imperial possession, it lasted longer than most, but by 1965 the winds of change were blowing a gale. A unilateral declaration of independence attempted to prolong white minority rule, but to no durable avail. After a long civil war, majority rule was established and the country was renamed Zimbabwe.

The new nation inevitably fell victim to decades of post-colonial problems, culminating in the hyperinflation of 2008, which peaked at a monthly rate of 79.6 billion percent. Early in the novel, a character reports the lament: “Zimbabwe used to manufacture cars. Now it imports paraffin stoves.” The comment is made during a game of squash. (By which point the tone of the early pages had convinced me that the author is a white Englishman of a certain type, old enough to remember at least folk memories of empire, if not empire itself. There is no I-told-you-so scolding, but the view is clearly from the mother country, so “C.B. George” can safely be seen as a crazy mash-up of very British signifiers, from C.B.E. — Commander of the British Empire — to King George and Prince George and St. George.)

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The eponymous Rex Nhongo is Gen. Solomon Mujuru, under a nom de guerre,a real-life hero of the war of independence who leveraged his status to become an integral part of the new power elite. The novel opens with a preface describing his real-life fate — found apparently burned to death in his house, earlier seized from a white farmer during land reforms. There may have been gunshots. The security detail may have been asleep. In any case, their radio was broken, and they had no minutes left on their cellphones. The attending fire engine turned back because its leaking water tank ran dry. This information is relayed in a straightforward, declarative style. (By now I had rejected the plausible possibility that the author is a journalist or nonfiction writer. The tone of the prologue argues against it. The impression is of a gifted storyteller setting up his tale.)

Despite the title, the death of Rex Nhongo plays no substantial part in the story. A gun that might or might not have been used at the scene becomes a minor MacGuffin, but there are no repercussions, no riots, no civil unrest. Indeed, some critics have found the novel insufficiently political. But in my view that inattention is deliberate. The characters in the book, like people everywhere, largely ignore politics and simply get on with their lives. They can’t afford not to, and anyway, as the principal Zimbabwean character says, “It is hope that causes most problems.” We get little real sense of Zimbabwe itself in terms of its sights and sounds and smells, of the hustle of its daily routines. The setting is a bare stage; what matters in this story are the people.

But what people they are, and how well drawn they are. Principally there are three married couples whose lives and families collide and interact through backyard barbecues, play dates, domestic servitude and adultery. April and Jerry Jones are from Britain: she on government service at the Harare embassy, he a diplomatic spouse at loose ends. They have a 2-year-old son, Theo. Shawn McClaren is an African-American from New York, newly unemployed, who has changed his last name to Appiah and has accompanied his unstable Zimbabwean-born wife, Kuda, back to her homeland. They have an 8-year-old daughter, Rosie. Patson is a taxi driver, married to Fadzai, whose brother, Gilbert, is married to Bessie, who works as a maid in the Jones household. And so on.

The connections grow complicated, and mostly difficult. The three marriages are stressed in different ways. Two grow weaker, and one grows stronger, in inverse proportion to the reality of the pressures faced. Personal attractions and external repulsions produce unpredictable reactions. Not all the characters survive. Linking the increasingly intertwined strands is the secret policeman Mandiveyi, with problems of his own, in hapless pursuit of the aforementioned firearm. Anton Chekhov said that if you introduce a gun in the first act, you’d better use it by the third, and the author does, to stunning effect.

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Along the way, the narrative’s eye flits from one character to another, like a camera zooming in, pausing, then moving on. These portraits are superbly achieved, and the text is studded with memorable observations. About young Gilbert’s seduction of Bessie and her subsequent unplanned pregnancy: “Wasn’t this always the outcome when a boy with too much confidence charmed a girl with too little?” Of Bessie and her much older sister-in-law, Fadzai, equally long-suffering: “Both women, for all their apparent practicality, are ruled by their generous hearts — often stoicism’s secret ingredient.” This author understands people and can effortlessly marshal a large cast through emotional intricacies.

All that said, there are minor weaknesses. The Appiah family’s story is seen mostly through 8-year-old Rosie’s eyes, related in an italicized dialect, full of misspelled words, presumably meant to represent the sound of a black New Yorker, which grew irritating very quickly and was unrecognizable to this Manhattan resident. (Leading me to stand firm in my conclusion about the author’s English background; while he might have spent many years in southern Africa, he surely hasn’t spent very many in New York.)

When it comes to Rosie, the author abandons his foothold as a latter-day Graham Greene and tries to become Stephen King, with a supernatural possession that jars in a text otherwise so acutely quotidian and superbly human — although it must be said that this gives the book its only real oh-my-God thriller moment, when the reader figures something out ahead of the characters. Win some, lose some. Over all, it would be churlish to let these small negatives outweigh a generally terrific achievement.

But whose achievement? Who is C.B. George? A general clue, I think, lies in the narrative’s swooping, restless movement, which feels like a long tracking shot, reminiscent of the nearly eight-minute opening of the 1992 Robert Altman movie, “The Player.” A more specific indication comes later, when April Jones asks her lover a question and adds a clarifier after the narrative interjects: “Then, off his apparent surprise. . . .” “Off his” is a parenthetical character direction seen everywhere in movie scripts but never before (at least by this reader) in a novel.

I think C.B. George is a screenwriter — and now also a novelist of great quality.

Lee Child is the author of the Jack Reacher thriller series.

A version of this review appears in print on July 31, 2016, on page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Origin Unknown. Today's Paper|Subscribe

The Book

To Whom It May Concern:

I always maintain that if a human has no respect for facts and truths, he/she is not much a human; in fact, he/she is an intellectual and emotional coward whose soul is that of a monkey. And I've seen far too many ugly monkeys on the forums, among them TamiKaKa and Paul Van are prime examples. 

The Bible has been propagated and extolled as a work written by scribes who somehow had a direct pipeline to "God" and used as basis for Jewish and Christian religious beliefs. Many adherents of Judaism and Christianity, whose minds have been stunted for failing to think critically tend to accept all the words written in the Bible as absolute truths. 

I recently came across a book called 101 Myths of the Bible, How Ancient Scribes Invented Biblical History, written by Gary Greenberg, President of the Biblical Archaeology Society of New York. The book was first published in 2000.

I urge interested readers to get a hold of this book and digest it and then decide for themselves

What is Fact and What is Fiction, What is Truth and What is Bullshit

in the Bible. 

This book should be read in conjunction with the book entitled The Vital Question that I recently mentioned. 

War and the Pentagon, a book review by Elizabeth Senior in the NYT

In 2009, Rosa Brooks, a newly appointed civilian adviser at the Pentagon, had a dispiriting conversation with Samantha Power, then on the National Security staff. Ms. Brooks had solemn doubts about the prisoners living in indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay. This was her field of expertise — human rights, international law. Yet her new colleagues wouldn’t give her a proper hearing.

Ms. Power replied that she was having the same experience at the White House. “I can’t even get in to see the president about this,” she tells Ms. Brooks in “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon.” “Literally. Before the election, this guy” — Barack Obama, she meant — “was my friend, but right now I can’t even get 10 minutes with him without going through six layers of self-important jerks.”

At its finest, “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything” is a dynamic work of reportage, punctuated by savory details like this one. But Ms. Brooks has a larger ambition: She wants to explore exactly what happens to a society when the customary distinctions between war and peace melt away. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has been fighting shapeless, stateless enemies, all with no discernible end in sight. How, Ms. Brooks would like to know, do our institutions and legal systems adapt?

“As the boundaries around war and the military grow ever more blurry,” she writes, “will we all pay a price?”

This is hardly a new question. But Ms. Brooks, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and columnist for Foreign Policy magazine, is in a decent position to answer it. During her time as counselor to Michèle Flournoy, an under secretary of defense, Ms. Brooks was in the room where it happens. Or the adjoining room, at any rate.

When Ms. Brooks’s book lives up to its subtitle — “Tales From the Pentagon” — it delights. The author is a chipper field guide and canny ethnographer, writing with refreshing honesty about the folk ways of the Department of Defense, which often confound outsiders.

Her observations about the culture gap between government civilians and the military are especially revealing. She recounts once receiving a phone call from a member of the White House national security staff, asking the Pentagon to make a drone available for monitoring a human rights crisis in Kyrgyzstan. She replied that the military tends to make these decisions slowly, cautiously, and that she’d need more information: Where would the drone come from? Which pot of money would pay for it? Whose airspace would it use?

The caller from the White House was incredulous. “We’re talking about, like, one drone,” he told her. “You’re telling me you can’t just call some colonel at CentCom and make this happen?”

She explained that the chain of command in the military didn’t work that way.

Equally illuminating is her examination of the resentment that the military has generated by expanding its role, assuming responsibility for all manner of unlikely projects. In its efforts to stamp out future generations of terrorists, the Pentagon has sponsored peace concerts in Africa, distributed soccer balls with anti-extremist slogans in Iraq, trained judges in Afghanistan — anything to shore up stability in volatile nations. It drives State Department personnel and aid workers — the people who would ordinarily be charged with such efforts — nuts.

“You’ve got these kids,” one Agency for International Development worker told her, “these 30-year-old captains who’ve spent their lives learning to drive tanks and shoot people, and they think they know how to end poverty in Afghanistan, in six months.”

Strangely, it’s when Ms. Brooks dives into her own area of expertise that her book loses some sizzle. After her lively investigation of the way we fight now, she pivots and takes a historical look at how we’ve attempted to define and regulate war, and how the modern notions of human rights and international law came about. She then examines the moral conundrums of the so-called war on terror, which test the limits of these ideas.

Is detaining a suspected terrorist lawful or a violation of habeas corpus? Is enhanced surveillance essential to our national security or an infringement of our privacy? Are drone strikes, conducted in secret and according to secret criteria, acts of murder or justifiable acts of war? Have we spent the last 15 years setting dangerous international precedents?

Her discussion here is energetic, her case histories are well selected and her thought experiments clarifying. But they’re explainers rather than paradigm changers. The questions she asks don’t dramatically reframe the conversation.

Ms. Brooks’s writing possesses a few grating tics. Officials often “sigh” as they express their frustrations. She repeats herself a lot. Her tone can get jokey, with over-cute chapter subheadings — “Ahoy, Matey!,” “Hiya, Senator” — and she invokes literary clichés to explain her ideas. (Tolstoy’s unhappy families, Hemingway’s wisecrack about the rich having more money, etc.)

I also sometimes wondered who Ms. Brooks was writing for. When she protests that “many military personnel don’t see killing as central to their jobs,” it seems embarrassingly obvious. At some point she refers to Senator Lindsey Graham as “the scourge of the Democratic Party,” which I originally thought was a misprint: If you’ve spent 10 minutes in the Senate, you know that Senator Graham, for better or for worse, is one of the more bipartisan Republican lawmakers on the Hill.

Yet Ms. Brooks generally has more complicated sensibilities than that of a traditional liberal. True, she comes from a leftist, staunchly antiwar household — she’s the daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich, poet laureate of the proletariat, and John Ehrenreich, a psychologist and academic who has written a great deal about humanitarian issues. But she also worked at the Pentagon and married a lieutenant colonel in the Army. Much of what animates this book is the tension between these two important aspects of her life, and it may explain the divided nature of the solutions she proposes to suit the vagaries of modern war.

One would doubtless please her parents: She says the United States will have to relinquish some of its sovereignty in exchange for “more just and effective mechanisms for solving collective global problems.” Structures of international governance would have to be reformed and rebuilt; here at home, we would have to insist on more transparency and better oversight to enforce the rule of law.

It all seems wildly romantic, especially at a moment when Trump and Brexit voters are ascendant.

Another proposal is radical in a very different way. Rather than shrinking the defense budget and redistributing funding to civilian institutions — an impracticable solution, given Congress’s abiding commitment to the Pentagon and the military’s already-galactic scale — she proposes making it even bigger, recruiting those with talents useful for 21st-century conflict. And then, she boldly suggests, we should make service compulsory for everyone.

“Some might choose to carry the traditional weapons of a soldier; some might teach or build roads; some might write computer code to protect vulnerable systems,” she writes.

Again, it’s a political nonstarter in 2016. But she may be onto something. Expanding the Army worked for F.D.R. (and the world). Why not again?

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

Tales from the Pentagon

By Rosa Brooks

437 pages. Simon & Schuster. $29.95. 

Islamic Paradise as Seen by a Muslim Writer

ORAN, Algérie — A écrire un jour : une topographie du paradis dans l’imaginaire médiéval musulman. Pas seulement l’imaginaire médiéval d’ailleurs, puisque pour beaucoup de musulmans le paradis est aussi au centre du discours politique, du prêche et de l’imaginaire actuels. Le paradis comme but pour l’individu ou le groupe a remplacé peu à peu les rêves de développement, de stabilité et de richesse qu’avaient promis les décolonisations d’après-guerre dans le monde arabe. Désormais on ne parle des lendemains qui chantent que pour après la mort, pas avant.

“Le paradis se pare de délices” rêvassait un éditorialiste dans un journal islamiste algérien pendant le dernier Ramadan, mois de jeûne. S’en suivaient des descriptions de grâces, de délices et de joies qui attendent le bon croyant dans l’au-delà. Ce fantasme du paradis, largement présenté comme espace de jouissance, avec sexe et vin, parures d’or et vêtements de soie, est le contraire de la vie d’ici — et des frustrations des pays arabes touchés par les échecs économiques, les guerres et les dictatures sanglantes.

Le firdaous (lointain ancêtre du mot “paradis,” souvenir du perse), promis par le Coran, est abondamment décrit par la littérature religieuse depuis des siècles. Mais ces dernières années le paradis est aussi devenu le pays rêvé du pauvre, du chômeur, du croyant — et du djihadiste, grâce à certaines élites religieuses qui le promeuvent comme stratégie de recrutement.

Fascinant renouveau du concept d’utopie comparé à l’idée que l’on se faisait par ici du bonheur il y a un demi-siècle. Les pays du Maghreb et du Moyen Orient, nés de décolonisations souvent arrachées de force à des puissances d’occupation qui leur avaient imposé guerre, pauvreté et misère, ont d’abord été les avocats d’une vision de l’avenir qui reposait sur l’indépendance, l’égalitarisme, le développement, la création des richesses, la justice et le vivre-ensemble.

Cette utopie à portée de main humaine, relayée par les élites socialistes ou communistes ou mêmes certaines monarchies, était un rêve politique partagé qui assurait aux nouveaux régimes une certaine légitimité auprès de leurs populations et de gouvernements étrangers. La décolonisation était le temps des grands slogans sur les avancées des peuples et la modernisation à coup de grands projets structurants.

Mais ce rêve a mal vieilli suite aux maladies sanglantes des régimes autoritaires et les échecs politiques des gauches dans le monde arabe.

Aujourd’hui il faut être musulman — de foi, de culture ou de lieu de résidence — pour vivre le poids de la nouvelle utopie, l’utopie post-mortem de l’islamosphère d’internet et des champs médiatiques. Celle-ci conditionne l’imaginaire, le discours politique, les rêveries de café et le désespoir des jeunes générations. Le paradis est de retour de mode, décrit avec d’hallucinants détails par les prêcheurs, les imams et la bitlit islamiste.

Point fort de ces descriptions : les femmes, promises en grand nombre comme récompense pour les élus de Dieu. Les femmes du paradis, les houris, sont belles et soumises, vierges et langoureuses. L’idée d’elles attise un érotico-islamisme hallucinant auquel le djihadiste aspire et les autres hommes fantasment, anxieux d’échapper à la misère sexuelle de leur vie quotidienne. Kamikaze ou misogyne, le rêve est le même.

Et pour les femmes admises au jardin éternel ? Si les hommes peuvent avoir des dizaines de vierges, qu’en est-il des femmes, vu le préjugé machiste des faiseurs de rêves sur terre ? La réponse des prêcheurs est parfois amusante : la femme est récompensée au paradis en devenant l’épouse comblée de son homme, les deux éternisés dans la félicité, à l’âge symbolique de 33 ans et en bonne santé. Et si la femme sur terre est divorcée ? Le prêcheur répond qu’elle sera remariée à un autre homme mort et divorcé lui aussi.

Etrangement, ce rêve du paradis musulman se retrouve confronté à un autre rêve à la fois antagoniste et semblable : l’Occident. Lieu de passion ou de haine pour le croyant musulman comme pour le djihadiste, l’Occident et ses licences est l’autre versant du paradis musulman post-mortem : On rêve d’y aller en migrant ou en martyr. On veut y vivre et y mourir, ou alors le soumettre et le détruire.

La nouvelle utopie du paradis musulman pèse aujourd’hui dans le monde arabe. Elle motive les foules, donne du sens à leur désespoir, allège le poids du monde et compense la tristesse, comme après l’indépendance le permettait la promesse d’un pays riche et heureux. Mais le paradis dans l’au-delà est une source de fantasmes qui crée aussi le malaise. Car même si on veut l’ignorer au plus profond de soi, on sait qu’avant d’accéder à cette utopie-là il faut d’abord mourir.

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Kamel Daoud, chroniqueur au Quotidien d’Oran, est l’auteur de “Meursault, contre-enquête.”

How Religion Can Lead to Violence by Gary Gutting in the New York Times

Wissai's Comment:

Only folks of room temperature IQ and emotionally weak people need Religion as a guiding force in their lives. In other words, Religion is for dumb asses and emotional weaklings. So, all the diatribes back and forth between the diehard and blind and brainwashed Catholics and those who adhere to other faiths in the forums are just laughable. Only the stupid would believe in untested dogmas and doctrines that fly in the face of logic, common sense, and scientific knowledge. Time is much better spent in reading Philosophy and History and Science.  

Most scientists, and people of high learning and intelligence and emotional fortitude see through the follies and fallacies of Religion. 

Wissai

8/1/2016

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The latest victim is a French priest, murdered in his church by killers shouting “Allahu akbar! ”Following such attacks, Muslim leaders assure us that, as Tariq Ramadan said after the Paris massacre, the murders are “a pure betrayal of our religion.” After the shootings in Brussels, the leading Sunni university, Al-Azhar, issued a statement saying,

“These heinous crimes violate the tolerant teachings of Islam.” Similar responses followed recent attacks in Orlando and Nice. We are told that the fanatical fringe groups who do these terrible things are at odds with the essential Muslim commitment to peace and love. I understand the reasons for such responses, but they oversimplify the relation of religion to intolerance and the violence it can lead to.

Both Islam and Christianity claim to be revealed religions, holding that their teachings are truths that God himself has conveyed to us and wants everyone to accept. They were, from the start, missionary religions. A religion charged with bringing God’s truth to the world faces the question of how to deal with people who refuse to accept it. To what extent should it tolerate religious error? At certain points in their histories, both Christianity and Islam have been intolerant of other religions, often of each other, even to the point of violence.

This was not inevitable, but neither was it an accident. The potential for intolerance lies in the logic of religions like Christianity and Islam that say their teaching derive from a divine revelation. For them, the truth that God has revealed is the most important truth there is; therefore, denying or doubting this truth is extremely dangerous, both for nonbelievers, who lack this essential truth, and for believers, who may well be misled by the denials and doubts of nonbelievers. Given these assumptions, it’s easy to conclude that even extreme steps are warranted to eliminate nonbelief.

You may object that moral considerations should limit our opposition to nonbelief. Don’t people have a human right to follow their conscience and worship as they think they should? Here we reach a crux for those who adhere to a revealed religion. They can either accept ordinary human standards of morality as a limit on how they interpret divine teachings, or they can insist on total fidelity to what they see as God’s revelation, even when it contradicts ordinary human standards. Those who follow the second view insist that divine truth utterly exceeds human understanding, which is in no position to judge it. God reveals things to us precisely because they are truths we would never arrive at by our natural lights. When the omniscient God has spoken, we can only obey.

For those holding this view, no secular considerations, not even appeals to conventional morality or to practical common sense, can overturn a religious conviction that false beliefs are intolerable. Christianity itself has a long history of such intolerance, including persecution of Jews, crusades against Muslims, and the Thirty Years’ War, in which religious and nationalist rivalries combined to devastate Central Europe. This devastation initiated a move toward tolerance among nations that came to see the folly of trying to impose their religions on foreigners. But intolerance of internal dissidents — Catholics, Jews, rival Protestant sects — continued even into the 19th century. (It’s worth noting that in this period the Muslim Ottoman Empire was in many ways more tolerant than most Christian countries.) But Christians eventually embraced tolerance through a long and complex historical process.

Critiques of Christian revelation by Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau and Hume raised serious questions that made non-Christian religions — and eventually even rejections of religion — intellectually respectable. Social and economic changes — including capitalist economies, technological innovations, and democratic political movements — undermined the social structures that had sustained traditional religion.

The eventual result was a widespread attitude of religious toleration in Europe and the United States. This attitude represented ethical progress, but it implied that religious truth was not so important that its denial was intolerable. Religious beliefs and practices came to be regarded as only expressions of personal convictions, not to be endorsed or enforced by state authority. This in effect subordinated the value of religious faith to the value of peace in a secular society. Today, almost all Christians are reconciled to this revision, and many would even claim that it better reflects the true meaning of their religion.

The same is not true of Muslims. A minority of Muslim nations have a high level of religious toleration; for example Albania, Kosovo, Senegal and Sierra Leone. But a majority — including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Malaysia — maintain strong restrictions on non-Muslim (and in some cases certain “heretical” Muslim) beliefs and practices. Although many Muslims think God’s will requires tolerance of false religious views, many do not.

A Pew Research Center poll in 2013 found that in Iraq, Malaysia, Pakistan and other nations in which Islam is officially favored, a large majority of Muslims think some form of Islamic law should be the law of the land. The poll also found that 76 percent of such Muslims in South Asia and 56 percent in the Middle East and North Africa favored executing Muslims who gave up their religion, and that in 10 Muslim counties at least 40 percent favored applying Islamic law to non-Muslims. This shows that, for many Muslims, the revealed truths of Islam are not only a matter of personal conviction but must also have a central place in the public sphere of a well-ordered society.

There is no central religious authority or overwhelming consensus that excludes such Muslims from Islam. Intolerance need not lead to violence against nonbelievers; but, as we have seen, the logic of revelation readily moves in that direction unless interpretations of sacred texts are subject to nonreligious constraints. Islamic thinkers like Ibn-Sina accepted such constraints, and during the Middle Ages Muslims were often far more tolerant than Christians. But the path of modern tolerance has proved more difficult for Islam than for Christianity, and many Muslims still do not accept the ethical constraints that require religious tolerance, and a significant minority see violence against unbelievers as a divinely ordained duty. We may find it hard to believe that religious beliefs could motivate murders and insist that extreme violence is always due to mental instability or political fanaticism. But the logic (and the history) of religions tells against this view.

Does this mean that Islam is evil? No, but it does mean that it has not yet tamed, to the extent that Christianity has, the danger implicit in any religion that claims to be God’s own truth. To put it bluntly, Islam as a whole has not made the concessions to secular values that Christianity has. As President Obama recently said, “Some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity.” This adaptation will be long and difficult and require many intellectual and socio-economic changes, some produced by outside forces, others arising from the increasing power of Islamic teachings on tolerance and love. But until such a transformation is achieved, it will be misleading to say that intolerance and violence are “a pure betrayal” of Islam.

Now in print: “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” an anthology of essays from The Times’s philosophy series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. His recent book, “What Philosophy Can Do,” is a collection of essays, expanded from his Stone columns.