Here's an interesting post by JihadWatch about the story of a journalist, Sean Langan who "sneaked into Pakistan last spring to interview top Taliban "Khalifa" Siraj Haqqani and Al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri. He was going to ask Osama Bin Laden's deputy if they had a nuclear bomb."
Instead, they did what we would most likely expect them do -- kidnapped them, locked them up and released him only after he said one of his son's name was Gabriel, the angel that narrated the Koran from Allah to Muhammad I am guessing.
And what's more, Taliban is clearly operating in Pakistan given the journalist account. At this point, given such overwhelming evidence, it would be nuts to claim Pakistan didn't know shit about the Mumbai blasts.
Langan, at the terror camp heard an ex-Pakistani minister on the BBC one day denying Al Qaeda operated camps inside the country.
"I had to turn up the radio to hear his denial over the sound of gunfire from all the training camps," Langan said, grinning.
I must admit, after the rude shock, I find JihadWatch very informative and awesome regarding Islamic totalitarianism.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Some Of My Insights -- Sense Perception and Volition.
I have been catching up with Greg Perkin's Objectivism Seminar and the training has been really great. It's the first time I am delving into philosophy and I could not thank the guys in the seminar enough. My totally extra special thanks to Greg and Kyle for such great insights which really helped in some integrations that stuck like hell.
I am done with sense perception and volition and have just entered epistemology. I quickly wanted to jot some of my insights..you know, track my journey a bit. (Volition was and still is a pain to get straight..so expect some shakiness).
So here they come --
1. Our senses have an identity and because it does have an identity -- it is limited. Simply because we have a means of perception does not mean we cannot know reality.
2. The distinction between form and object. (On a side note, everything we ever perceive is only our form of perception, to get to the object that is literally "out there" -- we have to conceptualize, draw abstractions and the like.
3. It does not matter in what form we perceive any object (electron level or Universe level) as long as we can conceptualize. Its the reason normal people and color blind people don't hold different theories of physics. Sense perception represent only our starting points of investigation.
4. Naive realism is wrong as no sense perception can exist in objects as apart from human mechanism.
And under volition --
5. The opposite of determinism is not indeterminism but chosen.
6. There are causes for our actions but they are chosen by the individual himself.
7. Any person is free to be in focus and expend the necessary effort or can drop his mental reins and relax instead of focusing. One cannot ask for a cause as to why a person chose to be in focus or not be in focus.
[Next in the series: Some Of My Insights -- Concept-Formation]
P.S. I am extremely happy as the blog is finally serving its purpose. I started off just to put things down instead of blurting things out -- and looks like my long, just kicking off intellectual journey won't go unrecorded. Hooray!
I am done with sense perception and volition and have just entered epistemology. I quickly wanted to jot some of my insights..you know, track my journey a bit. (Volition was and still is a pain to get straight..so expect some shakiness).
So here they come --
1. Our senses have an identity and because it does have an identity -- it is limited. Simply because we have a means of perception does not mean we cannot know reality.
2. The distinction between form and object. (On a side note, everything we ever perceive is only our form of perception, to get to the object that is literally "out there" -- we have to conceptualize, draw abstractions and the like.
3. It does not matter in what form we perceive any object (electron level or Universe level) as long as we can conceptualize. Its the reason normal people and color blind people don't hold different theories of physics. Sense perception represent only our starting points of investigation.
4. Naive realism is wrong as no sense perception can exist in objects as apart from human mechanism.
And under volition --
5. The opposite of determinism is not indeterminism but chosen.
6. There are causes for our actions but they are chosen by the individual himself.
7. Any person is free to be in focus and expend the necessary effort or can drop his mental reins and relax instead of focusing. One cannot ask for a cause as to why a person chose to be in focus or not be in focus.
[Next in the series: Some Of My Insights -- Concept-Formation]
P.S. I am extremely happy as the blog is finally serving its purpose. I started off just to put things down instead of blurting things out -- and looks like my long, just kicking off intellectual journey won't go unrecorded. Hooray!
Friday, December 26, 2008
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Just Wondering..
Just wondering if there is such a thing as moderate Islam. In the same breath, is there such a thing as peaceful Nazism? Even if followers of a particular philosophy do not see the danger of the philosophy -- it does not change the fundamentals of the philosophy one bit. For instance, if I irresponsibly write software that kills people, they have the right to call me vicious -- there is no is-ought gap.
Keeps me wondering whether any Muslim who has ever read the Koran evades the teachings or..i don't know, I just cannot cannot fathom how anybody could evade at such mammoth proportions by deciding to not look at the obvious.
I find it hard to believe there are 1.5 million people on Earth to whome I have to cut some slack if I cut some slack to one Muslim . Numbers don't matter -- imagine cutting a little slack to the Nazis -- there were far too many at one point in history.
Keeps me wondering whether any Muslim who has ever read the Koran evades the teachings or..i don't know, I just cannot cannot fathom how anybody could evade at such mammoth proportions by deciding to not look at the obvious.
I find it hard to believe there are 1.5 million people on Earth to whome I have to cut some slack if I cut some slack to one Muslim . Numbers don't matter -- imagine cutting a little slack to the Nazis -- there were far too many at one point in history.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Friday, December 5, 2008
The Mumbai Attack.
Although I dont have the time to write much, I could not resist posting about the Mumbai's terror attacks. JihadWatch has an excellent post echoing exactly my views on the ghastly event.
Here's the full post --
“Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism specialist with the Swedish National Defense College, said there are ‘very strong suspicions’ that the coordinated Mumbai attacks have a link to al-Qaida....” -- from this news article
Yes, yes. We have all heard the solemn discussions about whether or not the "Deccan Mujahideen" is a new group, or an old one, or a made-up group, and whether or not there is a "link" to Al Qaeda. And this kind of focusing on the trivial, the nearly insignificant, goes on and on and on, when the real point is this: these are Muslims. They may be from within India. Or not. They may be from Pakistan. Or not. They may have been encouraged or funded by Arab Muslims. Or not. They may have links to Al Qaeda. Or not.
What matters is that they are Muslims attacking, attempting to kill, non-Muslims, in order to obtain their aims. And their aims are to weaken -- in this particular case -- India. And they wish to weaken India in order to make the government of India appease Muslims and meet their demands, whether in Kashmir or in India proper. And once those demands, whatever they may be, are met, other demands from Muslims will be made, and will have to be met, for there is no end to this. The Jihad does not have an end point. There is not a finite goal, but rather an endless series of goals, with each success feeding triumphalism.
The only time this has not happened, in the past 1350 years, is when Muslims have been stopped, either by superior military power -- as outside of Poitiers, or when the Ottomans were repulsed twice at the Gates of Vienna, or by the clear understanding that the Infidels were overwhelmingly more powerful, militarily and economically. That, through the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, was clear to all concerned.
And though Muslims on their own, because of inshallah-fatalism, could never create advanced economies, they have become rich from oil (and gas), a manna that only an accident of geology could provide. Now they enjoy trillions of dollars which, while allowing many of them lives of incredible luxury and decadence beyond anything the Western world has experienced, also helps to fund the Jihad by paying for mosques, madrasas, armies of Western hirelings, propaganda, and campaigns of Daw'a. What's more, at the same time, and quite independently, the Western world, having forgotten its own historical experience of Islam, and its elites, political and media, having lost the ability to heed its real scholars and their cassandra warnings, instead listened to the espositos, the armstrongs, the assorted MESA-Nostra defenders-of-the-faith-and-fatah-of-Islam, and allowed into the Western midst millions of Muslims. They did this without realizing that they brought with them, undeclared, in their mental baggage, an alien and a hostile creed, one that flatly contradicts the principles -- all the principles -- of advanced Western societies.
These trillions in oil revenues, and these millions of Muslims who in an act of civilizational near-criminal negligence, have been permitted to settle deep behind what Muslims themselves are taught to regard as enemy lines, explain the threat of Jihad on a global scale today.
And there is no need to waste valuable time on the radio or television pondering ponderously whether the attackers are domestic or foreign, whether they are connected to Al-Qaeda or not. That may of some interest in helping to round this particular group up. But if too much time is spent on such matters, it distracts from the pedagogic task at hand: to explain to listeners and viewers that the key element here is Islam. It is Muslims pursuing, as they have a duty to pursue, Jihad. In this particular case they have chosen to do so using terrorism, but all around us other instruments, more effective because far less attention-getting, are being used toward the same goal, the same end: the removal of all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam -- everywhere.
That's why, when any "terrorism expert" -- some are good, some are not so good, some are idiotic -- proceeds to enjoy his time on the air discussing endlessly what this group should be called, what other groups it is linked to, what its "cause" is -- it's a case of missing-the-pointness that, at this point in the history of the world, is downright dangerous.
I just wish the Indian government had half the number of balls JihadWatch does.
Here's the full post --
“Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism specialist with the Swedish National Defense College, said there are ‘very strong suspicions’ that the coordinated Mumbai attacks have a link to al-Qaida....” -- from this news article
Yes, yes. We have all heard the solemn discussions about whether or not the "Deccan Mujahideen" is a new group, or an old one, or a made-up group, and whether or not there is a "link" to Al Qaeda. And this kind of focusing on the trivial, the nearly insignificant, goes on and on and on, when the real point is this: these are Muslims. They may be from within India. Or not. They may be from Pakistan. Or not. They may have been encouraged or funded by Arab Muslims. Or not. They may have links to Al Qaeda. Or not.
What matters is that they are Muslims attacking, attempting to kill, non-Muslims, in order to obtain their aims. And their aims are to weaken -- in this particular case -- India. And they wish to weaken India in order to make the government of India appease Muslims and meet their demands, whether in Kashmir or in India proper. And once those demands, whatever they may be, are met, other demands from Muslims will be made, and will have to be met, for there is no end to this. The Jihad does not have an end point. There is not a finite goal, but rather an endless series of goals, with each success feeding triumphalism.
The only time this has not happened, in the past 1350 years, is when Muslims have been stopped, either by superior military power -- as outside of Poitiers, or when the Ottomans were repulsed twice at the Gates of Vienna, or by the clear understanding that the Infidels were overwhelmingly more powerful, militarily and economically. That, through the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, was clear to all concerned.
And though Muslims on their own, because of inshallah-fatalism, could never create advanced economies, they have become rich from oil (and gas), a manna that only an accident of geology could provide. Now they enjoy trillions of dollars which, while allowing many of them lives of incredible luxury and decadence beyond anything the Western world has experienced, also helps to fund the Jihad by paying for mosques, madrasas, armies of Western hirelings, propaganda, and campaigns of Daw'a. What's more, at the same time, and quite independently, the Western world, having forgotten its own historical experience of Islam, and its elites, political and media, having lost the ability to heed its real scholars and their cassandra warnings, instead listened to the espositos, the armstrongs, the assorted MESA-Nostra defenders-of-the-faith-and-fatah-of-Islam, and allowed into the Western midst millions of Muslims. They did this without realizing that they brought with them, undeclared, in their mental baggage, an alien and a hostile creed, one that flatly contradicts the principles -- all the principles -- of advanced Western societies.
These trillions in oil revenues, and these millions of Muslims who in an act of civilizational near-criminal negligence, have been permitted to settle deep behind what Muslims themselves are taught to regard as enemy lines, explain the threat of Jihad on a global scale today.
And there is no need to waste valuable time on the radio or television pondering ponderously whether the attackers are domestic or foreign, whether they are connected to Al-Qaeda or not. That may of some interest in helping to round this particular group up. But if too much time is spent on such matters, it distracts from the pedagogic task at hand: to explain to listeners and viewers that the key element here is Islam. It is Muslims pursuing, as they have a duty to pursue, Jihad. In this particular case they have chosen to do so using terrorism, but all around us other instruments, more effective because far less attention-getting, are being used toward the same goal, the same end: the removal of all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam -- everywhere.
That's why, when any "terrorism expert" -- some are good, some are not so good, some are idiotic -- proceeds to enjoy his time on the air discussing endlessly what this group should be called, what other groups it is linked to, what its "cause" is -- it's a case of missing-the-pointness that, at this point in the history of the world, is downright dangerous.
I just wish the Indian government had half the number of balls JihadWatch does.
Busy Time...And Some Gifts Ofcourse!
I've have not posted for sometime now as I am interning in The Supreme Court Of India. It will be a few more weeks till I get back to writing. I travel for 2 hours everyday so am catching up with the podcasts of The Objectivism Seminar. I have just begun sense perception and still have a long way to go.
In the meanwhile, I would like to leave you some fitness gifts. A loong list of gifts I must say. Go here to check them out.
In the meanwhile, I would like to leave you some fitness gifts. A loong list of gifts I must say. Go here to check them out.
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