Following the human Space Invaders, here’s Guillaume Reymond’s stop-motion Tetris.

The game was ‘played’ by 88 people during the Les Urbaines festival in Lausanne, Switzerland, on November 24th 2007.

More films in the archive.

Further to comments on how stating the obvious can scandalise PC sensitivities, this seems relevant. Andrew Bostom comments on the firing of jihad terrorism specialist, Stephen Coughlin, and notes the contrast with America’s first encounter with the jihad phenomenon, some two hundred years earlier.   

Bill Gertz, Washington Times national security columnist, reports that the Pentagon has fired Stephen Coughlin, its most knowledgeable specialist on Islamic Law and jihad terrorism. As Gertz observed aptly, the Pentagon thus ended the career of its most effective analyst attempting to prepare the military to wage ideological war against jihadism.

This past September, 2007, I lectured with Mr. Coughlin, a US Army Reserves Major, at The Naval War College, and witnessed his brilliant, tour de force presentation which elucidated the reliance of contemporary jihadism on Islamic Law. Coughlin demonstrated meticulously that Jihad fi Sabil Allah – “Jihad in the cause of Allah,” is the animating principle which underlies the threat of global jihad terrorism, and how this understanding should form the basis for rational, effective threat development assessment, and war planning. That Coughlin’s analyses would even be considered “controversial,” or worse still lead eventually to his firing… is pathognomonic of the intellectual and moral rot plaguing our efforts to combat global jihadism…

Coughlin’s reasoned conclusions simply update and complement, exquisitely, what serious scholars of jihad have long argued about revivalist movements throughout Islamic history. For example, forty years ago (in 1967), John Ralph Willis observed regarding the 19th century jihadist movements in West Africa, specifically, and such historical movements in general,

The jihad… is essentially an instrument of revival, employed for the purpose of extending the frontiers of Islam and leading the faithful back to [its] roots.

…In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in London with the Tripolitan Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of jihad piracy—murder, enslavement (with ransoming for redemption), and expropriation of valuable commercial assets – emanating from the Barbary States (modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya). During their discussions, they questioned Ambassador Adja as to the source of the unprovoked animus directed at the nascent United States republic. Jefferson and Adams, in their subsequent report to the Continental Congress, recorded the Tripolitan Ambassador’s justification:

… that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their [Qur’an], that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Stephen Coughlin understands and enunciates what was stated openly to then Ambassadors John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – and what they apparently understood – by the Tripolitan Ambassador Adja. During his September 2007 presentation… Coughlin updated this timeless Islamic formulation into its modern context:

If the enemy in the War on Terror states that he fights jihad in furtherance of Islamic causes that include the imposition of Shari’a law and the re-establishment of the Caliphate; And Islamic law on jihad exists and is available in English; Then professionals with WOT responsibilities have an affirmative, personal, professional duty to know the enemy that includes all the knowable facts associated with the law of jihad.

Stephen Coughlin has been fired for reminding his peers of this basic obligation.

The whole thing.

As former jihadist Tawfik Hamid has repeatedly pointed out,

Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it… It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence… The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Sharia. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts.

It is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals have become obstacles to reforming Islam… They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism… If the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror… All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices.

And yet there are those, among them the incorrigible Seumas Milne, Madeleine Bunting and Karen Armstrong, whose lists of “root causes” include almost anything except the obvious, of which we must not speak.

Andrew Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism.

Related. And. Also.

The Amazing Adventures of Little Batman. Jump to 5 minutes in. Wait for the Batmobile. And the Scooby Snacks. // “Real life superpowers.” Lion taming, mental feats, alarming dislocation. // Comic strips of the 1930s. // Lichtenstein deconstructed. // The pyramids. (h/t, Maggie’s Farm.) // Earth’s mightiest rollercoasters. // The thermochromic toilet seat. “The object retains the heat memory of a previous user and displays it as a visual marker for the next user to assess.” (h/t, Coudal.) // The Asian squat. And how to do it. // Solar flare, flaring. April 21, 2002. (mpg) // The Milky Way in motion. (h/t, Centripetal Notion.) // Elementary astronomy, circa 1876. (h/t, Coudal.) // Medieval cookery. From candied horseradish to venison custarde. // The museum of air sickness bags. (h/t, 1+1=3.) // Airship hangers we have known and loved. // A directory of Japanese sound effects. // Outlandish loudspeakers. // Stapling machine. // End papers. (h/t, Drawn!) // John W Campbell’s Who Goes There? (1938) A little science fiction chiller. // And, via The Thin Man, a warming winter ditty.

Mike Libby’s Insect Lab customises real bugs with electronic components and antique watch parts.

For that Burroughs / Cronenberg chic.

Following recent posts on academic groupthink and campus indoctrination, this may be of interest. Mark Bauerlein ponders oppositional narcissism and the rebel professor: 

The Adversarial Campus Argument… says that the campus must contest the mainstream, that higher education must critique U.S. culture and society because they have drifted rightward… Several points against the Adversarial Campus Argument spring to mind, but a single question explodes it. If Democrats won the White House in ‘08 and enlarged their majorities in Congress, and if a liberal replaced Scalia on the Supreme Court, would adversarial professors adjust their turf accordingly? Would Hillary in the White House bring Bill Kristol a professorship or Larry Summers a presidency again?

Hardly, and it goes to show that the Adversarial Campus Argument isn’t really an argument. It’s an attitude. And attitudes aren’t overcome by evidence, especially when they do so much for people who bear them. For, think of what the Adversarial Campus does for professors. It flatters the ego, ennobling teachers into dissidents and gadflies. They feel underpaid and overworked, mentally superior but underappreciated, and any notion that compensates is attractive. It gives their isolation from zones of power, money, and fame a functional value. Yes, they’re marginal, but that’s because they impart threatening ideas.

The idea of academic administrators and professors picturing themselves as Luke Skywalker figures – pitted against an evil empire of oppressive bourgeois vales – is rather quaint and not without comic potential. And, as we’ve seen, ‘rebellion’ of this kind is often difficult to distinguish from absurdity, psychodrama and reactionary role-play. Take, for instance, Dr Caprice Hollins, a speaker on “multicultural issues” and currently the Director of Equity, Race and Learning for Seattle’s public schools. Hollins has famously criticised individualism, long-term planning (or “future time orientation”) and the speaking of grammatical English as “white values.” The expectation among teachers that all students should be responsible individuals and meet certain linguistic and organisational standards is, according to Hollins, a form of “cultural racism.” When not denouncing punctuality and the ability to communicate, Dr Hollins finds time to deconstruct the “myth” of Thanksgiving as “a happy time.” Speaking of her appointment in 2004, Hollins announced,

“Now I’ll be part of a system that some people see as an oppressive system. So it’s kind of this dual role – on one hand I’m part of the system and on the other, I have the role of dismantling that institutional racism… They wouldn’t have hired me if there wasn’t a need. I just need to find out what that need is.”

Some three years later, Hollins admitted to the Seattle Times that she had, in fact, managed to find no evidence of institutional racism in Seattle’s public schools. Dr Hollins is, of course, still employed and still claiming her $86,000 salary. Without a flicker of irony or concession, Hollins has subsequently extended her mission beyond the school gates. In order to find unspeakable wickedness “within the school system”, she is now reduced to turning over stones in children’s summer holidays, which, she claims, constitute “an example of systemic problems.” Dr Hollins is, alas, one of many Witchfinders General, whose sensitivity to oppression is apparently paranormal and whose mission to purge improper thought is unimpeded by reality.

And here’s the thing. Adversarial role-play of this kind has very little to do with how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism – and in order to justify funding, influence and status – great leaps of imagination, or paranoia, may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of oppression have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untrained eye. The rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t.

Related. And. Also. Plus.

Fund my bourgeois conformity. I have people to oppress.

Just discovered the Rumpus Room’s video for the Pet Shop Boys’ Integral, complete with QR-coded web links to be read with camera phones. It’s a wee bit cheesy and bombastic, as you might expect, but it’s not without a point.

More. And.

Further to this, Mona Charen ponders the nature of the enemy.

The next to last assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto came… when a man in the crowd got the former prime minister’s attention. He was holding a one-year-old baby – Bhutto said later she thought it was a girl – and tried to hand the child across the sea of bodies. Bhutto said, “He kept trying to hand it to people to hand to me. I’m a mother. I love babies. But the [street lights] had already gone out and I was worried about the baby getting dropped or hurt.” So she turned away and ducked into her armoured vehicle. Just then, the baby’s body, rigged with explosives, detonated.

That is the nature of the enemy. Thursday morning brought news that another bomber has succeeded in killing Bhutto. Early reports suggest that this time the terrorists relied on a suicide bomber and a gunman. Al-Qaida was quick off the mark. “We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahedeen,” said commander and spokesman Mustafa Abu al-Yazid in a phone interview with Adnkronos International. Whether al-Qaida really did the killing or opportunistically claimed credit is unclear. But there is no doubt that Bhutto represented a modernising movement within the Islamic world and was accordingly seen as a threat by the seventh century zealots who rig babies with explosives.

A vile ingenuity not without precedent. 

In a previous post regarding the strangely airless Liberal Conspiracy blog, we saw how the obligation to substantiate political claims with logic and evidence induced fatigue in contributor Zohra Moosa. Ms Moosa told us she was “tired” and “distracted” by defending her assumptions and wished instead to “actualize” her beliefs, unhindered by ethical challenges or reference to harsh realities:

What I need is a safer space where I don’t lose so much energy justifying why social and environmental justice are worth spending a lot of society’s money on.

Another item, by Guardian contributor and Fabian Society mouthpiece Sunder Katwala, is noteworthy insofar as it too makes assumptions that are grand, fairly commonplace and oddly unanalysed. Mr Katwala has written at length about “equality” and “social justice”, which appear to be regarded as synonymous, though neither term is defined in any satisfactory sense. In his Liberal Conspiracy piece, titled How Do We Get a Fairer Society?, Katwala argues,

In Britain today, where we are born and who our parents are still matters far too much in determining our opportunities and outcomes in life. And so our own choices, talents and aspirations count for too little. The vision of a free and fair society would be one which extends to us all the autonomy to author our own life stories… This ‘fight against fate’ – breaking the cycle of disadvantage to make life chances more equal – could provide the lodestar to guide future action and campaigns for equality.

If one strips away the tendentious phrasing, questions soon begin to occur, most obviously regarding “who our parents are” and why it so often matters. Does the “fight against fate”, so conceived, acknowledge the role of parental agency – specifically, the efforts made by many parents, not least by working class parents, to optimise their children’s “choices, talents and aspirations”? How do Katwala’s assumptions of “social justice” and “equality” – as ill-defined yet unassailable virtues – relate to the foresight, care and sacrifice which some parents demonstrate, often heroically, and which others, alas, do not?

If what parents do for their children “matters far too much”, would Katwala prefer the efforts of conscientious parents to be thwarted in the interests of “equality” and “social justice”? In Mr Katwala’s ideal, corrected, society, would the role of parenting in the outcome of a child’s prospects be rendered trivial, perhaps irrelevant? And, if so, is that really for the greater good? Unfortunately, such questions hang in the air, unanswered. Katwala is, however, keen to “deepen” this egalitarian agenda “within and beyond the education system.” To which end, he lists four points to “narrow the gaps in life chances” – all of which sideline parental responsibility and presuppose even greater interference by the state:

1. Ending child poverty.
2. Get family policy right.
3. Target increased resources on disadvantage.
4. Start a rational debate about the impact of private education.

Some readers may, of course, wonder why it is we have a “family policy” to “get right”, and others may have views on the role played by parents’ values and decisions in their children escaping poverty. Most will note that Katwala, like Ms Moosa, is keen to spend even more of “society’s money” on those deemed “disadvantaged”. But Katwala’s fourth point is perhaps the most telling. Note that Mr Katwala is far more interested in the (implicitly negative) “impact” of private education on those who don’t experience it. Much less concern is expressed for the rather more obvious, and much more negative, impact of state education – specifically the Socialist ideal of comprehensive education – which is, after all, where the “disadvantaged” tend to be schooled.

To you and yours, a very good one.

Here’s a little something for fans of the outlandish and uncanny. BBC4’s documentary series on British science fiction, The Martians and Us, can now be viewed online. Part one, Apes to Aliens, takes evolution as its theme and traces a brief and entertaining history, from H.G. Wells’ anonymous time traveller to John Wyndham’s unearthly schoolchildren. The three-part series covers the obvious and the obscure, the inspired and the unhinged, and teases out what has often made British science fiction different from, and darker than, its American cousin.

Here’s a taste.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Part 2, Trouble in Paradise, and part 3, The End of the World as We Know It, are also online. Well worth watching. (h/t, The Thin Man.) Related: The original 1960 trailer for Village of the Damned. And here’s George Sanders having trouble keeping secrets.