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The Decline of Jihadist Activity in the United Kingdom.
Modern Muslim Political Thought.
The World's Population Reaches 7 Billion, But Don't Let the UN Scare You.
How Government Props Up Big Finance
The Decline of Jihadist Activity in the United Kingdom.
For more than 15 years, the United Kingdom has been widely viewed as the central hub of Islamist terrorism in the West. Since the 1990s, jihadists radicalized in the United Kingdom have been involved in many ambitious overseas terrorist plots, from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the failed Stockholm suicide bombing in December 2010. Radical clerics based in “Londonistan,” such as Abu Qatada, have meanwhile incited jihadist violence in North Africa, Europe and throughout the Middle East. In addition, the United Kingdom has itself been targeted. A successful attack by a homegrown terrorist cell in July 2005 on the London transport system killed more than 50. Many other domestic plots, ranging from plans to conduct assassinations and kidnappings to the plot to blow up several trans-Atlantic airliners either failed in their execution or were disrupted by the police and security services. To date, nearly 150 individuals have been convicted of terrorism offenses in the United Kingdom since 2001.
Recently, however, there are indications that the United Kingdom may no longer be such a key center for global jihadism.
To read more, click here.
Modern Muslim Political Thought.
The onset of what is now referred to as the Arab Spring has re-ignited the debate about the viability of liberal democratic political systems in Arab and Muslim-majority societies. These societies, having suffered under brutal dictatorships for decades, are generally viewed as being closed, inward-looking and resistant to change. Liberal democracy is, therefore, viewed by many, as far too ambitious a goal; hence policy makers in the west have traditionally favoured stability rather than democratization in the region. However, this approach fails to take into account the fact that ever since Muslim-majority societies began interacting with European colonial powers, a lively debate about the nature and direction of Muslim political thought followed. This debate was often divisive and heated, but more importantly, it is still alive, evolving and has the potential to shape an increasingly important region of the world.
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According to the United Nations, the World's population reached 7 billion people on October 31st. Well, maybe not exactly on Monday; the US Census Bureau estimates that it will happen sometime in March next year. But let's not quibble over the date: the UN has never been very good at forecasts, especially of the future. For decades, it has claimed that the rising tide of humanity would overwhelm the environment and lead to food shortages - unless urgent action is taken to stem the tide. And for decades it has been wrong: Per capita food production has been rising and the environment generally improving.
Meanwhile, when "urgent action" has been taken, in the form of forced sterilisations, for example, or China's one child policy, the result has been grotesque violations of human rights.
But still the UN persists.
To read more, click here.
How Government Props Up Big Finance.
Given this moral and practical failing, it is a shame that envy plays such a large role in the Occupy Wall Street protests spread around the country. And, yet, the Occupy movement does have a point that transcends this negative emotion: the financial industry has grown large on the backs of government handouts, manipulated regulation, and taxpayer bailouts.
While there is no objective size the financial industry should be, it is fair to say it would never have become this large without the crony capitalist system that has masqueraded as a free market. In the process, the financial industry has absorbed resources that could better be used elsewhere while imposing large, systemic risks on the economy. Watching others grow rich from special privilege understandably leads to envy, but from this perspective, the high compensation received by financial industry leaders is merely a symptom of a much larger problem.
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Thomas Patrick Burke
ON BEING ALIVE
1. Every human being is a distinct center of action.
We know this about ourselves directly. We know from our experience of ourselves that being alive means being active. We are never merely passive, in the way that a rock is passive. Even perception, which is often thought of as a mere passive reception of an impression from outside, is an activity of our mind, and does not occur if we are not awake and attentive. Of course we receive impressions, but that reception is an activity of our senses and our mind. From the first our senses and our mind desire and reach out for perceptions, and it is this active readiness for them and reaching out towards them which is what makes them possible.
Action is not merely an accidental feature or quality of the mind, the way the shape of a rock is an accidental quality of the rock. Every human person is made for action. We have this purpose or goal of activity built into us as part of our nature as a seed is made for growing up into a tree. This is a purposiveness or directedness inherent in the mind itself. Just as the mind is made for thought, so it is made for activity, thought itself in this sense being indeed one kind of activity. But while thought remains within the mind, we are also made for choice and decision which passes into action that has an effect beyond the limits of the mind into the world around us. Every human being has the power to initiate action in the world and has an inherent tendency to do that.
We can broaden this observation and state that life in general is inherently active. Plants and animals, in their own way, if they are alive, by their nature desire to perceive, and actively produce effects on the world around them. Plants seek the sun. As Plato observed, in a statement that has received far less attention than it deserves, living things have the power to move themselves. We express this general truth by saying the life is teleological. It is never content to be what it is, but is always seeking to achieve a goal. The English poet Matthew Arnold says in a well-known poem that old age and youth have this in common, discontent. But discontent is true of every living being by their very nature as living beings. The minimal goal that all living things seek is survival: to continue to live. That is, to exist; for life is the existence of the living thing and to die is to cease to exist, vita viventium esse as mediaeval philosophers said. Survival is always uncertain. But the teleological goal of the acorn goes beyond mere survival as an acorn: it is to become an oak. The otherwise great English philosopher John Locke, attempting to understand human knowledge scientifically, misunderstood this quality of living things and influenced generations of thinkers to misunderstand it. He taught that the original mind at birth was a blank slate, tabula rasa, and was purely passive, written on only by the hand of sense experience. This misses not only an important truth about the human mind, but about the nature of life.
In recent months we have watched dramatic scenes in the Middle East that are relevant to this mistake, one previously made by the communists of Europe. The communists loved to talk about "the masses." The destiny of the masses was to be molded and shaped by the communists. The communists would be active, but the masses were thought of as passive. They were material for the communists' experiments. Of course the communists loved the masses, or said, and perhaps even thought, they did. But they did not love the masses as individuals. They loved them as a whole, so to speak, or en masse. If a few million individuals had to be killed for the sake of the whole masse, that was ok. It followed that some people, namely the communists, were more valuable than other people, namely the masses. And so it was very natural for them to have special privileges not accorded to the masses. One day, however, in the autumn of 1989, the masses showed they had been misunderstood and were individuals after all. They acted, tearing down the Berlin Wall. Now we have seen similar events occurring before our eyes on the streets of one city after another in the Arab world.
Nothing guarantees that the actions of these distinct centers of action will be benign. Every possibility of good is also a possibility of evil. The outcome of the revolts in the Middle East may in every case be tragic for themselves and others, their last state far worse than their first. Nonetheless, they have illustrated a great truth about human beings, that peoples long assumed to be passive clay in the hands of their fate have within themselves the wellsprings of initiative. For the rest, the mysterious source from which every free action originates is creative. It is not condemned to repeat the past.
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