Poor Idiot! Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Reason and other Things she doesn't understand.

It’s just…well. How…? I sat down to comment upon her insipid article she wrote in the NY Times (a review of Lee Harris’ new book) because it’s so wrong in parts and contradictory in others, but I started to prepare quotes just now and I just don’t have the time to comment on every other sentence of her. So I won’t comment. I’ll quote some parts and leave the laughing to you.

Each Muslim is a slave, first of God, then of the caliphate.

and

But what makes America unique, especially in contrast to Europe, is its resistance to the philosophy of Hegel with its concept of a unifying world spirit. It is the individual that matters most in the United States. And more generally, it is individuals who make cultures and who break them. Social and cultural evolution has always relied on individuals — to reform, persuade, cajole or force. Culture is formed by the collective agreement of individuals.

and

The problem, however, is not too much reason but too little. Harris also fails to address the enemies of reason within the West: religion and the Romantic movement. It is out of rejection of religion that the Enlightenment emerged; Romanticism was a revolt against reason

Moral and cultural relativism (and their popular manifestation, multiculturalism) are the hallmarks of the Romantics.

and

Many of the Westerners who were born into the law of the jungle, with its alpha males and submissive females, have since become acquainted with the culture of reason and have adopted it. They are even — and this should surely relieve Harris of some of his pessimism — willing to die for it, perhaps with the same fanaticism as the jihadists willing to die for their tribe.

You see me grinning. Have a nice and hilarious sunday. Do it my way. Don’t get mad. Laugh. Today it worked. See? No rant. Maybe it’s listening to Jefferson Airplane. Works wonders.

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