Politblogo

STEYN ATTACKS!

My first foray into the dangerous world of political mockery by image editing.

Johann Hari has an excellent takedown of Mark Steyn's book on the impending European Islamopocalypse. 

Johann Hari - Archive: But this cannot hide the gaping holes of logic and fact in his argument. To fulfil his headline predictions, Steyn needs to turn 20 million European Muslims into more than 200 million European Muslims - in just 13 years. Only Fallacci's rats could reproduce so rapidly. Steyn even admits that the history of demographic predictions is hysterically inept, noting that "most twenty-year projections... are laughably speculative, and thus most doomsday scenarios are too" - before offering his own.

Europe's real demographics are described in a similar book by a slightly more scupulous author. Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of the Washington Times and DC grande dame, last year wrote 'The West's Last Chance' predicting an enfeebled Europe would collapse before the Muslim hoardes. But after studying the figures, he admitted: “For almost every Western European country, their populations do not even begin to decline until at least 2025... In fact, for the next few decades, they continue to go up, even without any new immigration… The numbers only begin to move decidedly down about fifty years from now.” So for Steyn's predictions to hold true, the current Muslim birthrate needs to hold steady through five decades of life in the West, all Muslims have to become communitarian Islamists bent on sharia law, and there must be no natalist policies from European governments in the meanwhile.

Perhaps sensing this groaning crack in the foundation of his argument, Steyn adds hastily: "It is not necessary, incidentally, for Islam to become a statistical majority in order to function as one. At the height of its power in the eighth century, the 'Islamic world' stretched from Spain to India yet its population was only minority Muslim." But they were - a fairly obvious difference - not electoral democracies, where any group has to command a majority to rule.

And it goes on thusly to deconstruct Steyn's panicked racist natalism.  The main flaw of the article is that he resurrects the common multiculturalism strawman (and I am told he is an otherwise odious libertarian conservative of some kind?  Many people I like seem to hate him, and this is the first time I've ever heard of him), but for shooting the pirhana in the barrel so well, I'll forgive him.

Airlines and airports - a review

(Yes, yes, I'll eventually get you your pictures.  Geez.  Can't you give a guy some time to even organize his hundreds of photos?)

So, as you can imagine, going to specific locations in South Asia from the You Knighted States can get pretty complicated indeed!  One generally doesn't have direct flights at that distance even between major locations, and even a convenient indirect route can be expensive.  I travelled between India and Pakistan as well, and while the two countries are technically next to each other, in travel terms, and Pakistanis watch a whole lotta Indian soap operas, they may as well be on different continents.

Consequently, I've had an opportunity to sample several combinations of airlines and airports in the "Old" World (hah!), and I have even been able to build up a thorough impression of some of them.  And I will briefly share with you some insights.

• I took United Airlines to Munich on one leg of my voyage.  I fly United domestically quite often, and even once in first/business class, and, as expected, international economy (I'm not made of money!) was a little bit closer to domestic business class than to domestic economy.  The flight was uneventful, the entertainment selections adequate.  However, I had bulkhead seats.  Now, if I were so worried about legroom, I'd have been happy about this.  But I am not, shall we say, narrowly built.  Bulkhead seats,  because they are at the front, have the entertainment system and tray table built into the armrests of the seats, meaning that precious inches of, er, spread are lost.  The food is boring neutral-Americanish food, but it was acceptable.
• Munich airport itself was a relatively acceptable experience.  American arrivals are in one terminal, and international departures are in another.  The terminals are not connected by a bridge, bus, or train system, and consequently it is not possible to make the sort of connection that we were making without immigrating to Germany on tourist visa status, which is trivial for Canadians to get right there at the passport control gates (this is the case for most of Europe).  The passport control guard was friendly and helpful, as were most of the airline staff, and stereotypically German Lufthansa employees. 
• We had a few hours in Munich, and we window shopped at the exterior mall attached to the other terminal before entering.  We were curious about the grocery store there and explored it and confirmed that everything does cost twice as much in Germany.  We had to pass passport control again to exit Germany into the other international terminal---exit control is unfamiliar to most North Americans but seems to be the norm in the rest of the world.  Munich is a new and underutilized airport, and parts of this other terminal were built but completely abandoned.  Food choices were few beyond the security checkpoint (competent, helpful staff!), and we should have eaten in the mall food court outside.  The airport is connected to Munich via Munich's metro, and I regret not spending a couple of hours in the city, but the rest of our group thought it was a bad idea for their ersatz travel arranger to run off without them (and they were too tired to explore on their own).
• Completely opposite to the Munich experience was the Frankfurt experience on another leg of our complicated journey.  Frankfurt is a massively overused, undercapacity airport that is cold and dirty and has little to recommend itself.  Whose big idea was it to let M. C. Escher design an airport?  Let's just say that while I've had bad airport experiences, I have never felt so maltreated by airline employees as there.  It was a very, very negative experience.
• Lufthansa sucks.  Compared to the other airlines we took, Lufthansa's seats were very narrow, as though Germans were little people or something.  Leg room was OK, but even business class looked cramped.  The food was boring, and they didn't have individual entertainment systems like every other modern airline has even in economy class.  We all had to watch The Devil Wears Prada.  At least the flight attendants were polite.  I almost rather they had not been, so that I would have been prepared for the Frankfurt experience.  I won't fly Lufthansa again unless it's seriously cheaper, which it ought to be.
• I had several flights on Emirates.  The experience is totally different from Lufthansa.  Seats were for the most part wide and comfortable.  The individual entertainment system was very comprehensive with more selection than you could really want.  Some of the planes allow you to play videogames with other seats.  The food was good and plentiful, and the service was friendly and prompt.  I'd definitely fly them again.  Emirates is supposed to be expensive, but I did a great deal of research on this trip, and it was the cheapest option to get to Karachi at that time.
• Dubai airport is good, but it's still overrated.  People who travel more frequently than we were telling us how wonderful the airport was, but it didn't even have the same variety of restaurants that some of the major North American airports do...which is not saying much, of course.  If we wanted to check into an internal hotel, than it might have been wonderful.  The duty free stores were OK but I don't understand the fuss.   Nevertheless, I have few complaints about Dubai airport.   The food and services were very reasonably priced.  The best thing about it was the free and ubiquitous wireless Internet access; in most airports, they charge you $10 for a little bit of access, which is extremely annoying.  Not so in Dubai.  Lastly, you aren't allowed into the gate lounges until they're ready to board you, basically, and there isn't enough seating outside the gate lounges.  They obviously expect you to shop.
• The airport in Karachi ran surprisingly well for something run in Pakistan.  I mean, it was, for the most part, a normal large airport.  People still didn't follow the rules (Pakistanis don't believe in rules), but at least things worked.
• The airport in Chennai was surprisingly dilapidated for a major city in India.  Bathrooms are disgusting.  Efficient and orderly, at least in our experience, but oddly dilapidated.
• Finally, United Airlines was OK.  For the most part.  Well, on our way back we had a flight attendant with a mental toothache, so to speak.  Eventually, she divulged the reason for her mental toothache, and I sympathize.  Capitalism sux.  But the airline was OK.  Not spectacular, not bad.  Individual entertainment, but not the selection or quality of Emirates.  Food was whatever the local caterers brought.  Do not trust them when they say that it is "turkey, not ham."  It is probably ham.

That last, you may wonder why I didn't order the halal meal.  Well, it goes like this: for stuff I don't cook myself, I'm not all that strict about halalitude.  A lot of North American Muslims are like that.  If I ordered the halal meal, I'd have been condemned to eating beans and rice on all the non-Emirates flights (Emirates is 100% halal, they emphasize it in their literature, and I believe them).  Usually, the airlines have a meal that isn't pork.  We had one exception which my pork radar was easily able to detect.

Boston Globe article on the cartoon riots

Via a commenter on Brad DeLong's blog, this excellent opinion piece in the Boston Globe re the Danish cartoon violence and its overall context:

Boston Globe - Misunderstanding Muslims: The economics of oil, including the creation of an oppressive local class of Western-sponsored oligarchs, locked the grievous insult in place. As if to be sure it was more sharply felt than ever, Europe imported ''guest workers" from the Islamic world, openly consigning them to an underclass that is as religiously defined as it is permanent.

And then the United States launched its wars. One of the major disconnects in the present conflict is the way in which European and American analysis obsesses with the apparently anarchic outbursts of violence in the ''Arab street" without taking in how brutally violent the post-9/11 ''coalition" assault has been, not only physically but psychologically.

Mobs throw stones through the windows of European consulate offices, and the legion of CNN watchers recoils with horror. Meanwhile, unmanned drones fly across stretches of desert to drop loads of fire on the heads of subsistence farmers in their villages; children die, but CNN is not there.

Billions of dollars are being poured each month into the project of imposing an American solution on an Arab problem, and increasingly the solution looks, from the other side, like annihilation. Muslims, that is, understand the new reality far better than non-Muslims do -- the state of open cultural warfare that ''the West" imagines is a narrowly targeted war against ''terrorism." Muslims, as Muslims, experience themselves as on the receiving end of a savage -- but, alas, not unprecedented -- assault.

Are they wrong? In the argument over ''Enlightenment" values, sparked by the cartoons, some champions of free expression have fallen into the deadly old mistake that led, in the 20th century, to a grotesque betrayal of those very values -- the over-under ranking of human beings, with the lives of some being counted as cheap.

Why are we killing them? As with multiple problems today, this one comes back to the misbegotten American war. It threatens to ignite the century, and must be stopped.

Like I've been saying---abstract worries over Free Speech are a luxury that is, in any case, a red herring. 

Spitting in eyes

I was going to write my own post on the Danish matters, but a number of other bloggers have written posts that are better than mine, despite their relative distance (relative to me) from the focus of the conflict.  In particular, Steve Gilliard's view:

Refusing to meet with the Arab ambassadors was a serious mistake. The Syrians showed how seriously

I have been amazed at the way people, first, refuse to understand that depicting Muhammad in any form is a grave insult, second, this was done by a right wing newspaper to piss people off, and third, how shocked Europeans are at the way Muslims feel about a grave insult to their religion.

Now, the Europeans play the innocent party, and people suggest that Muslims should leave if they don't like being insulted in the West.

I am somewhat uncomfortable with the occasional bit of American triumphalism that creeps into the rest of his post, but by and large he is correct---perhaps even including European models of social integration of immigrants.  His coblogger Jen intercedes with some of the shallower criticisms of the riots, but he deals with them quite effectively.

Now, as a Muslim myself, I am perhaps somewhat closer to the focus of this conflict, as I said above. It's clear that the Danish paper was intending to slap people when they were down.  But a lot of Muslim negative reaction to Western media has a history with which Western commentators are often totally unwilling to deal: Israel.  Namely, saying certain things about Israel are rightly or wrongly considered taboo in the West, but saying analogous things about the reasons for opposing Israeli policy (and, frankly, the legitimacy of the Israeli state) are not.  Rightly or wrongly.  This is considered a cosmic double standard, because Israel is quite frankly the prism through which most of the Muslim world sees global politics.  To make use of the Prophet Muhammad himself in this double standard would widely be considered one too many injuries to bear.

(And, of course, some people are suggesting that certain interested second-and-a-half parties are actually instigating this.  We'll see if such suggestions pan out.)