Saturday, February 21, 2009

Lazy Man Yawns   [Mark Steyn]

Over at Time, Joe Klein isn't terribly happy about my column this weekend, and one of his commenters, Paul Dirks, adds the following:

"Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the global population to just over 20 percent, while the Muslim world increased from 15 percent to 20 percent."
.
Constructing a dichotomy bnetween "Developed" and "Muslim"?
.
The language cop in me, needless to say, not only finds that offensive but utterly lazy as well.

Hey, why take my word for it? I lifted my utterly lazy offensiveness from the longtime prime minister of Malaysia (one of the least worst Muslim nations), Dr Mahathir Mohammed:

"We produce practically nothing on our own, we can do almost nothing for ourselves, we cannot even manage our wealth," he added... In spite of a number of Muslim nations being extremely wealthy, there is not a single one of them that can be classified as "developed" by any criteria. "[We are] lagging behind in modern knowledge, financial and technological skills and in many instances, effective governments," he lamented. In addition to poverty, ignorance and instability have become such common features in the Muslim world that its detractors assume these afflictions are the natural consequences of following the teachings of Islam, Mahathir said.

He's right and Mr. Dirks is wrong. The "Muslim" world is not politically developed, economically developed, intellectually developed, scientifically developed — objectively speaking. Nor is it "free". I mention in America Alone the 2005 Freedom House rankings of personal liberty and democracy: Five of the eight countries with the lowest "freedom" score were Muslim. Of the 46 Muslim majority nations in the world, only three were free. Of the 16 nations in which Muslims form between 20 and 50 per cent of the population, only another three were ranked as free: Benin, Suriname, and Serbia & Montenegro (which has now split into its constituent parts). As I add, "It will interesting to follow France's fortunes as a fourth member of that group."

Oh, and by the way, how do you become a "language cop"? Is it an elected position? Do you have to do a course? Or do you just throw out half the words in the dictionary, deny the plain meaning of a third of those left, and mark everything else as synonyms for "offensive"?

Bonus round: Even in the harem of PC eunuchs, isn't calling something "offensive", like, totally "utterly lazy"?

02/21 12:33 PMShare