Via Mark Steyn on the Corner, Tim Rutten at the LA Times wonders in his review of some intellectual’s wistful lament on how much better things would have been for the West if we’d been conquered by Muslims:
…it’s fair to wonder why, if that’s true, the West ended up with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the Scientific Revolution and the Islamic world got chronic underdevelopment, a pervasive religious obscurantism, Al Qaeda and the trust fund states of the Arabian peninsula?
Silly! I can tell you the answer to that: it’s all our, the Western World’s, fault! See, not letting the Muslims conquer Europe in the long-ago hurt the Muslims’ self-esteem. It made them feel bad. They had no choice but to let their countries become women-oppressing, slave-owning, terrorist-growing dumps.
(Via Ace of Spades.)
One Response to “Renaissance Unfair”
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January 25th, 2008 at 6:57 am
It occurs to me that we need a whole bunch more of the “Survivor!” series to deal with these folks who somehow think modernity is either uncool or even downright evil.
There could be Survivor: Saudi Arabia! for those who seemingly wish the world was a caliphate. And Survivor: Refugee Camp! for those who debate the virtues of plumbing and other hygiene advancements that have so far removed cholera from our consciousness that we can actually debate whether having flush toilets is better than defecating out on the street. And Survivor! Subsistence Farming for all those who say we should eat only food grown within some not-in-this-lifetime-for-most-of-us narrow radius of our homes.
And televise them. So people can actually become reacquainted with what things like scurvy and public floggings for minor infractions (and beheadings for the kind of infractions that would land someone like Paris Hilton on the cover of People) are like. That way, we wouldn’t get so many more of these “Western World Is Evil” idiots.