Right Wing Nation

Courtesy of Little Green Footballs:

“We’re the most oppressed people in the world today,” said Sarfraz Sattar, a database analyst who works in Newbury Park.

Hey Sarfraz, how’s the goat?

First, we have, from DUmmie Funnies, “As could be be expected, the loony left is OUTRAGED that this movie has aired as you can see just in the title of this DUmmie THREAD, “AFTER THEY AIR “PATH TO 9/11″ NO F’ING RETREAT, NO F’ING SURRENDER!” Also chiming in angrily on this subject were the Daily Kos KOmmies in this THREAD titled, “ABC Hits Panic Button? Frantic Re-Write Misfires.” And finally we have the HUffington Post HUffies filling out the leftist trifecta of angst with this THREAD lamenting the fact that a mere disclaimer just doesn’t do the trick from their point of view.” And here are a few excerpts from these threads:

AFTER THEY AIR “PATH TO 9/11″ NO F’ING RETREAT, NO F’ING SURRENDER!

Folks its time to organize, its time to follow through, its time to make good on our threats.

NO F’ING RETREAT, NO F’ING SURRENDER !!!

At 8:00 on September 10th, 2006, we will declare war on…. Disney/ABC!

Targeting where we can hurt them is the hard part
We have to target sponsors of top shows that are tied very closely to Disney or ABC.
BTW. THIS IS F*CKING WAR!!!

NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER GIVE IN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If we give up on this we will give up on everything they wish to spoon feed us. I have sent all of my e-mails, and cancelled plans for a vacation next summer in disney world. If they end up showing this docu, they will just as easily steal the elections in `06. But, actually `06 is ssssssooooooooooo minor compared to `08. They have no intentions of leaving, the power has been too much of a narcotic for them to give it to the dems.

I have had it with the lies and the distortions coming from the media!!! I used to watch ABC because I had believed that they were calling Bush out for the way he has screwed up our country!!! Now I have come to believe that the WHITE HOUSE NAZI is going to use ABC as his own PROPAGANDA CHANNEL!!! I want to know who is at ABC/Disney on the Bush payroll!! Who has become the new mouthpiece spewing out these lies about the greatest President we ever had since Jimmy Carter? Why are the American people going to put up with this garbage on their TV sets? Bush is the future dictator of our country and his manipulation of the media is going to continue until he is stopped!!!

Now, let’s contrast those with these comments from conservatives, from Ace’s latest Path to 9/11 thread (hat tip to the Anchoress):

But I think the main point they were trying to get across, was that the bad guys are the terrorist not the Administrations. They showed the failures of Clinton, and the inability of the key players to actually commit and make the hard decisions. If they edited anything, I don’t think it made a difference in what they were trying to get across. But I have to say if ABC was this willing to tear apart the Clinton Adminstration, then I’m willing to bet that tomorrow is gonna be brutal for Bush. - Spypeach

People should see this. They will have no doubt who the enemy is. And they will understand that we need to clean away all the bureaucratic BS that encrusts our war- (and crime-) fighting methods… - lmg

The Clinton administration didn’t look too great, but that’s not really critical. I find myself making allowances for it because no one else got it right, either including the Bush Adminstration–and it gets its turn tomorrow night.

Laying blame is not important; learning where we erred and re-evaluating our response, is. After all, we are all on the same side. Islamism got past Carter and Reagan, too. Clinton has illustrious company.

It was silly for the Democrats to get into an uproar about this as most people I know–Conservatives included–realize that people make mistakes, this was an unprecedented event, and the Clinton Adminstration didn’t wilfully try to make mistakes as a matter of policy. Stuff happens. Think of Hurricane Katrina. It could have happened to anyone. We must assume that they proceeded with the best of will and to the best of their ability.

My point of contention is that while a mistake is understandable, eviscerating freedom of expression in an attempt to cover it up, is not. - qwfwq

I was struck by the fact that a lot of ordinary people just trying to doing their jobs well saved the day again and again- the guys who found the VIN number, the police officer in the Philippines, the border agent who stopped the millenium bomber. I think the movie portrayed these people as the real heroes. Yes, the Clinton administration bungled, but I think the movie was showing the failings of bureaucracy, not trying to blame the Clinton administration. The reaction of Democratic senators shows that for the Democrats, politics really is more important than national security. - JeanE.

Liked it fine enough, didn’t really think it was that hard on the Clinton Administration compared to current political rhetoric in the nation. - wickedpinto

Hmmm. The distinction is remarkable, not unlike this one.

Children. Adults.
Screaming spoiled brats. Adults.

I wonder how our multiculturalists and identity politics wackjobs would spin this:

A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his “wife”, after he was caught having sex with the animal.

The goat’s owner, Mr Alifi, said he surprised the man with his goat and took him to a council of elders.

They ordered the man, Mr Tombe, to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars ($50) to Mr Alifi.

“We have given him the goat, and as far as we know they are still together,” Mr Alifi said.

How, uhm, romantic. So are the Swiss required by law to marry their goats?

Injection time.

Knowing as well as I do the propensity for educration “researchers” to cannibalize research from other fields, of which the educrats have no knowledge whatsoever, I cannot help but think that the source of this “higher level thinking / the students will learn by magic!” is at least partly a cannibalization of language acquisition research. It certainly shows an astonishing ignorance of the most basic knowledge about language to extend language acquisition to any other kind of knowledge or learning.

First, and most basically, language is — at least among the knowledge systems non-cognitive scientists or linguists consider to be knowledge systems — utterly unique. Every human being on the face of the earth (except for feral children, who are not exposed to language, or those with neurological development issues) learns language, and with next to no effort (this is what linguists mean when they say language is innate). If you’re a cognitive scientist, this isn’t unique, because other types of intelligence, such as being able to recognize a face, work the same way, but for anyone else, this is unique to language. Mary Beth does not learn math unless you teach her math. You cannot put Mary Beth in a roomful of mathematicians for the first six years of her life and expect her to emerge having acquired math, from nothing but exposure. But language? Every human being on the face of the earth. So it is neither logical nor justified to expect that language acquisition can be generalized to math, or any other knowledge system.

As an example of another type of learning, let’s take math. Math is the classic, linear knowledge system, and is what traditionalists base all other learning upon (incorrectly, but that’s another topic). Math is a linear learning process because before you learn algebra, you have to know the order of precedence, and before you learn the order of precedence you have to know the basic arithmetic operations, and so on.

Language acquisition, however, is wholly, bizarrely non-linear. As our first example, let’s look at strong verbs in English (often incorrectly referred to as irregular verbs),We do have irregular verbs in English. Be/am/are/is is an irregular verb, as is go/went/gone, specifically their past tense forms: come/came, give/gave, etc., as opposed to the weak, or regular, verbs: walk/walked, talk/talked, etc. Weak verbs all share the same past tense form (-ed), whereas strong verbs follow a whole set of paradigms, and form their past tense by changing the vowel of the root verb (come/came).

Let’s say, then, that we are observing language learners and their acquisition of the correct past tense forms for strong verbs (where acquisition refers specifically to the correct production in speech). If language were a linear system like math, we would expect to see something like this:

However, if we do such a study, this is not, in fact, what we see. Instead, we see this:

This is wholly unexpected. As learners are introduced to strong verbs, they produce the past tense forms mostly correctly. The percentage of correct forms decreases as learners apply the process of analogy and start incorrectly producing strong verb past tense forms by adding the weak ending (-ed). Then, students begin “relearning” those correct past tense forms.

This is not what we would see in a linear system, such as math. What’s going on? Well, it depends on who you ask, because there you get into theoretical models. What creates the U-curve really isn’t the issue; the fact that we don’t see this kind of learning curve in other knowledge systems is the issue.

But there are other, equally bizarre, properties of language acquisition. For example, no matter what the input, no matter in what order structures are introduced, no matter what their native language, or if they are learning a second language, language learners acquire structures in the same order, as has been borne out in research many times. Furthermore, this order has nothing (as far as we can tell) to do with linguistic complexity.

There are others. Most would assume that for those learning a second language, such as English, speakers of similar or related languages (say Spanish or German or French) would have an advantage over speakers of utterly different languages (say, Chinese or Japanese). But the research clearly shows that this is not the case. The similarity of languages seems to have no effect on the rate at which the learner acquires the second language.

More? Forty years of data overwhelmingly show that instruction and correction have no significant effect on language acquisition, that it makes no difference how many times you correct a student’s usage of the definite article, that definite article is one of the very last things students acquire, and your correction will have no perceptible effect on production (of course, every parent has seen this with the “Can I? May I!” dance parents do with their children).

So the order in which you actually learn language has nothing to do with how it is formally presented, in what order structures are formally presented, paradigms you may memorize, correction — and here’s the kicker, at least for me — linguistic complexity. And it makes no difference whether we are talking about children learning their native language, or children learning a second, third, fourth, fifth or one-thousandth language. We do see one important difference at about the age of puberty, in that something happens (and no, nobody knows what it is) that changes the ease with which we learn language. Children learn language effortlessly; adults learn language, but with more effort. Yet even with adults, we see all these other same weird non-linear patterns.

Whole Language did, in fact, come out of language acquisition, but it is a misguided theory. Reading and writing are not natural language. We have to learn to read. We have to learn to write. We learned and used language, just as we do now, for many thousands of years before the first writing system was developed. Although reading and writing are certainly linguistic, they are not innate in the way natural language is innate. The massive failure of Whole Language in our schools is an illustration of my point: You cannot generalize language learning to any other kind of learning.

We do, indeed, “magically” learn language. Every one of us. That does not mean, however, that learning is magic. It only means that for whatever neurological reason, we are hardwired to learn language by merely being exposed to it.

But nothing else is like this — at least nothing that most of us would consider a knowledge system. Plenty of other things are like language in this sense, if you’re a cognitive or neuroscientist. But they’re all things we take for granted — as we do language — and don’t consider to be knowledge systems. Learning to walk and run. Being able to recognize a face or a place. But nothing else in the realm of learning or knowledge systems works like language.

There is no rational, reasonable, and certainly no scientific reason to assume that any kind of learning would work in the same, or even in a similar, way as language. Yet, it certainly looks like the educration “researchers” have pre-empted language learning as the model for all this “higher level thinking” nonsense, not to mention the “facilitating” and lack of instruction. And once again, educration shows its lack of intellectual basis.

So remember (ahem) “friend from Europe” (this would be “friend,” as Europeans and liberals define it — those who sell arms to those with whom you are war, take bribes from those with whom you are at war, that sort of thing, you know, allies) in this little comment, where he huffs off because his little Euroweenie feelings were hurt?

Well, we have today another wonderful example of Euroweenie moral degredation — not to mention sheer idiocy — from that bastion of “progressive” thought, the Telegraph:

The brutal excesses of Saddam Hussein’s regime were relived yesterday as Iraq’s new government announced that it had hanged 27 prisoners convicted of terror and criminal charges.

Awful! Terrorists were executed! Why weren’t they put in a cushy cell for a year or two, then let out, like our intellectual and cultural betters, the Euroweenies do! How could they execute freedom fighters for the CAUSE!

Europe is a waste of DNA. Hat tip: Misha I

The 2,996 Tribute Project. Update: the original site is down (not surprising), so Jen has graciously reproduced the entire list here. Thanks, Jen!

Always Someone You Wanted on Your Team

Tarel Coleman’s family knew when he was just a youngster that he was destined to be a firefighter. Not content to witness a fire from afar, little Tarel had to see one up close.

“At 5 years old, he stuck his head inside an incinerator to see a fire,” said his older brother, John Coleman Jr. Tarel had his eyebrows singed and lost some hair, but was otherwise unharmed. “That’s when we basically knew he was going to be a firefighter,” his brother said.

Tarel Coleman grew up to be a sports-loving, hip-hop music-loving member of Squad 252 in Bushwick. On Sept. 11, he died at the World Trade Center. The father of a teenage girl, Coleman was 32.

His brother said he and Coleman did everything together while growing up in Astoria and Rochdale Village. They were active children but never strayed far from the watchful eye of their mother, Laurel, he said.

“We were inseparable, mostly because our mother wouldn’t let us go out without one another,” he said. “He was very wild-eyed, very fiery … He was always someone you wanted on your team.”

Coleman graduated from Springfield Gardens High School and took the firefighters exam at age 18, though he wouldn’t join the department until several years later. In 1987, Coleman married Michelle Brown, and they had a daughter, Danielle, now 13. They later divorced.

Coleman joined the fire department in 1993, fulfilling his lifelong dream. He was an avid Giants and Knicks fan, played defensive back for a fire department football team and played flag football for a local club known as TNP (Take No Prisoners).

His no-holds-barred style of play earned Coleman the nickname “Prozac.” He also played softball for three teams, the X-Men and the Troublemakers of the Bricktown Softball League, and the L.I. Hitmen of the Nassau-Suffolk Softball Association, his brother said.

Tarel used his remarkable speed to become the “best outfielder there was,” said John Coleman, a member of Battalion 35 in Brooklyn, who followed his little brother into the fire department. “He batted leadoff. He was a switch hitter … He literally ran a 4.3 in the 40 [-yard dash].”

Running wasn’t the only thing Coleman could do with his feet. “He really did love to dance,” especially to hip-hop, R&B and salsa music, John Coleman said. “He would not leave the dance floor.”

Coleman also is survived by his father, John Coleman Sr. of Rochdale Village; two stepbrothers, Melvin Jackson of Bryans Road, Md., and Troy Jackson of Rochdale Village, and his fiancee, Kilsi Ciprian of Rochdale Village. A memorial service will be held tomorrow at 11 a.m. at Rochdale Village Community Center, 169-65 137th Ave., Rochdale Village.

I thought about how best to memorialize Tarel Coleman, and the others murdered five years ago. I decided against poetry. I finally decided the way to memorialize these men and women was to take us back to that day five years ago when we were attacked on our own soil, by republishing Lance Morrow’s essay from Time, “The Case for Rage and Retribution.”

The Case for Rage and Retribution
What’s needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury — a ruthless indignation that doesn’t leak away in a week or two
By LANCE MORROW

Posted Wednesday, Sep. 12, 2001

For once, let’s have no “grief counselors” standing by with banal consolations, as if the purpose, in the midst of all this, were merely to make everyone feel better as quickly as possible. We shouldn’t feel better.

For once, let’s have no fatuous rhetoric about “healing.” Healing is inappropriate now, and dangerous. There will be time later for the tears of misfortune note.

A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let’s have rage. What’s needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury—a ruthless indignation that doesn’t leak away in a week or two, wandering off into Prozac-induced forgetfulness or into the next media sensation (O.J. … Elián … Chandra …) or into a corruptly thoughtful relativism (as has happened in the recent past, when, for example, you might hear someone say, “Terrible what he did, of course, but, you know, the Unabomber does have a point, doesn’t he, about modern technology?”).

Let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with a short attention span. America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness—and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred.

As the bodies are counted, into the thousands and thousands, hatred will not, I think, be a difficult emotion to summon. Is the medicine too strong? Call it, rather, a wholesome and intelligent enmity—the sort that impels even such a prosperous, messily tolerant organism as America to act. Anyone who does not loathe the people who did these things, and the people who cheer them on, is too philosophical for decent company.

It’s a practical matter, anyway. In war, enemies are enemies. You find them and put them out of business, on the sound principle that that’s what they are trying to do to you. If what happened on Tuesday does not give Americans the political will needed to exterminate men like Osama bin Laden and those who conspire with them in evil mischief, then nothing ever will and we are in for a procession of black Tuesdays.

This was terrorism brought to near perfection as a dramatic form. Never has the evil business had such production values. Normally, the audience sees only the smoking aftermath—the blown-up embassy, the ruined barracks, the ship with a blackened hole at the waterline. This time the first plane striking the first tower acted as a shill. It alerted the media, brought cameras to the scene so that they might be set up to record the vivid surreal bloom of the second strike (“Am I seeing this?”), and then—could they be such engineering geniuses, so deft at demolition?—the catastrophic collapse of the two towers, one after the other, and a sequence of panic in the streets that might have been shot for a remake of The War of the Worlds or for Independence Day. Evil possesses an instinct for theater, which is why, in an era of gaudy and gifted media, evil may vastly magnify its damage by the power of horrific images.

It is important not to be transfixed. The police screamed to the people running from the towers, “Don’t look back!”—a biblical warning against the power of the image. Terrorism is sometimes described (in a frustrated, oh-the-burdens-of-great-power tone of voice) as “asymmetrical warfare.” So what? Most of history is a pageant of asymmetries. It is mostly the asymmetries that cause history to happen—an obscure Schickelgruber nearly destroys Europe; a mere atom, artfully diddled, incinerates a city. Elegant perplexity puts too much emphasis on the “asymmetrical” side of the phrase and not enough on the fact that it is, indeed, real warfare. Asymmetry is a concept. War is, as we see, blood and death.

It is not a bad idea to repeat a line from the 19th century French anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: “The fecundity of the unexpected far exceeds the prudence of statesmen.” America, in the spasms of a few hours, became a changed country. It turned the corner, at last, out of the 1990s. The menu of American priorities was rearranged. The presidency of George W. Bush begins now. What seemed important a few days ago (in the media, at least) became instantly trivial. If Gary Condit is mentioned once in the next six months on cable television, I will be astonished.

During World War II, John Kennedy wrote home to his parents from the Pacific. He remarked that Americans are at their best during very good times or very bad times; the in-between periods, he thought, cause them trouble. I’m not sure that is true. Good times sometimes have a tendency to make Americans squalid. The worst times, as we see, separate the civilized of the world from the uncivilized. This is the moment of clarity. Let the civilized toughen up, and let the uncivilized take their chances in the game they started.

Linked to Stop the ACLU, Don Surber, Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, Michelle Malkin, LaShawn Barber, Hugh Hewitt, California Conservative, Sister Toldjah