Saturday, June 30, 2007

Live From Glasgow: It's the Itchy and Scratchy Show.

Two men rammed a burning truck into the aeroport at Glasgow in an attempt to commit mass-murder. They were Muslims. For a number of people opining on the Internet this is like watching television. They see it from a distance, an emotional and intellectual distance, and feel they should tell the rest of us the Truth of the exercise, that it's all part of a scenario begun by a grand conspiracy mastered by the secret elite of oil barons and spies from the West. People whose deepest emotions are sentimental tell us they feel the pain of others. And those same tell us they grasp the cosmic significance of the Gnostic martyrdom at play in Glasgow, that it's a protest against poverty imposed by the robber-barons of Global Capitalism. I laugh-- at this point. It leads me to wonder about what the "real truth" is.

We have to wonder what it is that possesses a number of people to grow beards and obsess over the ravings of a seventh century lunatic warlord from the end of nowhere to the point they kill others and themselves in a state of rapture. But even more bizarre is that folks in the West don't seem to be too upset about it. Letters to the editor suggest it's a conspiracy by Mossad/MI5/CIA types to make things possible for the new Brit. p.m. to further frighten voters into giving up their civil liberties so the oil companies can wring more money out of the population. And a further mystery is that the average person will listen to some arsehole like that without losing his temper and hitting the speaker as he would if one were to shout filth in a church. Isn't there any limit to the things people will endure? I guess not. Welcome to the live version of the Itchy and Scatchy Show.

"Eyewitness Jackie Kennedy, 46, described how she watched one of the occupants of the car douse himself in petrol and set himself alight.

"He had a big smirk on his face. He lifted up what appeared to be a five-litre drum, which I think had petrol in it, and set himself on fire. His clothes were melting in front of my very eyes.

"The police tried to pounce on him but he fought back and was struggling with them. It was only when a member of the public punched him in the face that the police managed to restrain him. The police were trying to spray CS gas in his face but it was not working."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article2010062.ece
Well, the beard is itchy, and the burning himself up has to be scratchy, so I'd say that's a fine headline.

Graphic from: 1. Burning Love
Summary: Itchy shoots Scratchy, who is relaxing on a hammock, with a flaming arrow.
Episode: Krusty Gets Busted (112/7G12)
DVD Location: Season 1/Disc 2 (2:48 - 3:04)
krustofski.com

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6 comments:

Ypp said...

"it's a conspiracy by Mossad/MI5/CIA"

That shows to those who want to see the state of sanity in the West. Very sad.

Dag said...

I'll have to alter this post to explain for those who read it later that it refers to the car bomb that smashed into the aeroport terminal in Glasgow. It's obvious to all of us today but in a week or so we'll be on about something else and readers of our archives won't know what this is about.

I think lack of memory is a good thing, though, in that it keeps resentments to a generation or so rather than as a substitute for culture that one sees in so many places ruled by vendetta and family feuds that have roots somewhere in the mists of time, if I strangely may mix my metaphors.

Sad, yes. Weird too.

truepeers said...

I went looking for the conspiracy theorists at you link; couldn't find them. Doesn't really matter. NO originality. Mossad? CIA? This is like the people who have been blaming the Freemasons for running a global conspiracy since the French Revolution. And the Masons are still bad guys in the Hamas charter. No originality. People need their conspiracies when they can't explain the logic of a modern marketplace, or, it seems, a religion, that works by the logic of an invisible hand, and Allah is the most invisible of all the one God Gods, which is perhaps why this nutter in Glasgow couldn't stop shouting "Allah" as he tried to carry on WWF moves while in flames.

Now, since there is actually a conspiracy to rob Brits of their liberties, and it's called the EU with its new "treaty" that imposes the constitution Europeans didn't and wouldn't vote for, a "treaty" that will give the EUnuchs power to write and police their own criminal law in the former nations, and to impose their own foreign policy on everyone, you would think the conspiracy nuts could do a little better with this car bomb business. I mean it's either a Brussels job, or a BNP tactic. I just need a little help making the connections.... Of course, it could be that these guys in Glasgow airport were just in too much of a hurry to get home to Baghdad...

But it's not a laughing matter, just because reality is optional for a lot of people. Take, for example, the header for a link at your Times Online page:

"The Brits that plotted to wreak death and carnage

Five men who hoped to kill thousands with a fertiliser bomb were described as ruthless misfits who betrayed their country" which links to this article. The characterization of the "ruthless misfits" who "betrayed their country" belongs to the sentencing judge. That strike me as a very partial representation of reality. Time to look into the heart of Islam, the conspiracy that isn't.

Dag said...

I was flying across the Internet last day, and the conspiracy theories came out at, I believe, Times.online. Someone listed them likely suspects, Mossad, CiA, MI5. But, you know, in this day ad age it could have been any paper at all, the conspiracy theorists not being limited to middle-class English papers of good sense. It might have been in the Globe and Mail. One needn't go far to find the nutters indulging in the Big-Hate Communion.

Was it in this morning's The Age that I found more nonsense referring to the the impetus for such terrorism? A Brit spoke to the public telling them it's not due to troops present in Afghanistan, Iraq, or wherever. He urged vigilance and cooperation with the police. Fine, even good, but he made no mention of why the Muslims do this. No one pours himself over with a bin of petrol and lights himself in protest over a war in his home country. It transcends protest and lapses into religious ecstacy. That's the motivation. That's why the Early Church condemned martyrdom-seeking in Rome. They saw it for what it is: Gnostic posturing that has nothing to do with the religion as it was becoming in Christianity.

The Imperial Court of the E.U. fiddle. They lord it over the masses and present bread and circuses, but there will come a time when it doesn't work anymore. There will come a time when people are disgusted by the pomp and the vanity of the lot of them, Muslims and dictators alike, and then we'll see a new move on the part of the survivors.

Meanwhile, the "martyr" who lit himself gets to find out what Michael Moore is so keen to prove: that socialist medicine is the finest in the world; the scratchy guy gets to live, (let's hope,) in a skin burned, his largest organ burned; and he will live in prison for all of his life in agony.

No conspiracy. Men whipped themselves into a fit of frenzy and fervour and tried to commit mass-murder. It's ordinary.

And it's dirty. To pander to it, to pretend some secret and superiour understanding of it based on a trite analysis gleaned from a term in a sociology course at a community college in Kansas hardly makes it real or even, as most of these Leftist creatures would prefer, sophisticated.

Look at those who live at "Home" in Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange. Those are the E.U. types who will some day meet the Muslim droogies face-to-face, and then we'll see how they react. Fortunately, the English and the Scots still have the capacity from life to grasp the ability to make a distinction between right and wrong. Muslims don't. From what I see in the papers I see that many in Canada, Australia, and America can choose and determine to choose evil. They're so much smarter than we.

Too bad for me I was always disgusted by Roman history. Knowing more of it might well come in handy about now.

Dag said...

I saw this at the Daily Kos. It's not as over-the-top as the piece I saw at one of the standard dailies last day; this is more or less from the Democratic Party of America. Woe is us.

"I'm not trying to trivialize terrorism by pointing to the apparently amateur nature of these incidents. In fact, the amateurishness is a particularly disturbing sign. It was bad enough when a small but dedicated group of people wanted to attack us -- now we have ordinary people who watch the abomination of our actions in Iraq and feel like they can't sit on the sidelines anymore. These men were clearly very determined. But we do need to guard against whipped up fear: it was precisely the manipulation of public fear that allowed the administration to take actions that have made the situation infinitely worse. The doubts expressed at this site about the lethality of these devices and the professionalism of the people involved were valid and important for understanding what is actually going on."

"Stupid Terrorist Trick at Glasgow Airport [Updated]"
by AceDeuceLady
Sat Jun 30, 2007

truepeers said...

I didn't really have a serious look for that conspiracy comment - there was no obvious way to get to comments on the article.

I'm not doubting the nutters are out there but why are they everywhere? In part, because like your Kos lady, they are sufficiently aware of human nature to grasp that societies, even modern multiculti Western ones, tend to (try to) bond themselves by bonding against an Other/enemy. This then leads the Kos kids to try and use their college-credentialized "critical thinking" skills to figure out how to disrupt this bonding game so there will be less war and everyone can just learn to get along without the old Othering ways, in contrast to the good Mothering ways. Of course, their utopianism can soon only be defended by their taking on their own form of authoritarianism and organizing everyone against the big OIL BUSH Other, or whatever real or imagined reality disturbs their peace of mind.

As Jim Kalb puts it: "Mindless utopianism therefore turns out to be a direct consequence of the strictly pragmatic, skeptical and critical spirit of modernity when that spirit becomes a dogma, as it must when it becomes sufficiently dominant."

What the Kos kids never seem to grasp is that their little insight into human nature is just as true on the other side. Countless millions of Muslims also bond themselves against an Infidel Other, i.e. us, and as such constitute a very real threat that we have to take seriously. But no, say the kids, they are only attacking us because of our actions in Iraq, or Israel, or Lebanon, and so on down the line to the time of Isaac and Ishmael - and wasn't the judge I quoted calling them Ishmaelites?

But of course the more we fear these "amateur" Ishmaelite outcasts, the more we will be to blame for their reaction to our reaction, in an infinite regression blame game back to the origin of man, the conceptualization of which is the last taboo of postmodernism, which is why this regression is infinite for postmodernism but not for sane people.

Surely the sane way forward is to start respecting these Ishmaelites for what they are, and having the nerve to act accordingly and demand they find/share with us a form of religion compatible with global modernity, or go back to a desert subsistence life with the diminished population and technology that will entail. It is people who cannot accept modernity and the patriarchal God that should go with it (the discipline demanding God without whom modern liberal freedoms would never first have emerged) who are prone to all matter of conspiracy theories, often as an outgrowth of a modern rationalism that has pronounced the death of God, though the devilish Jew-American remains.

The left-Islam alliance is a matriarchal fantasy in which the immigrant boyfriend is all fuzzy wuzzy and not like the toxic male/father of my children from whom one is of course divorced. No wonder some of these fuzzy wuzzies (whose supposedly highly "patriarchal" religion is at best half so) are now finding obnoxious ways to assert their manhood.