Knowing Your Enemies

VA has another nice post up today that she's calling "Those outlawed emotions, again." VA makes some good points that need to be made, and that I'd like to discuss here in a more lengthy entry. But for now I'd like to focus on one statement VA makes in her post...

VA writes:

"I have to return again to Yeats's line, 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.' Our enemies, whether they are Latinos with revanchist intentions, or Moslems with jihad, fast or slow, in mind, ARE full of passionate intensity, while too many Americans are still in a state of denial or else they have emotionally and spiritually been disarmed. That must change, otherwise we are outclassed and overwhelmed."

This brings to mind something I recently read in Paul Sperry's book, "Infiltration, How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington." Mr. Sperry bemoans the fact, and rightly so in my opinion, that we Americans do not know our enemy well. In this case, of course, Sperry is concentrating on our enemy, Islamism.

Mr. Sperry writes:

"We are fighting a spiritual seduction we have yet to fully grasp and comprehend, hung up as we are on measuring the dreams and happiness of others against our own dreams and happiness...A virtual taboo exists in official circles about Islam's role in terrorism. It is treated as if it comes out of the blue, as if there is no religious pattern. According to the president, we are fighting "evil-doers" and "a bunch of cold-blooded killers." To hear him and the FBI director, terrorism is generic, not Islamic." (emphasis mine)

Sperry continues:

"The first rule of war is know your enemy. You cannot defeat it if you do not know what motivates it.

Yet shockingly few FBI supervisors running counterterrorism cases have ever picked up a copy of the Quran to read it, let alone study it. "Supervisors don't study the Quran. They don't do any independent analysis," says former FBI special agent, John Vincent..."When you're fighting terrorism, you have to know how they think," adds Vincent...

Unfortunately, the enemy knows us better than we know it. The al-Qaida training manual quotes an old Muslim general: "The nation that wants to achieve victory over its enemy must know that enemy very well." The Islamic terrorists have studied our system inside and out, and they know its weaknesses and how to exploit them. They know about our open society, our civil liberties, our heavy ethnic mix, and our lax immigration enforcement all too well."

(I'll be adding more to this post later.)

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Quality is Superior to Quantity, and the principle applies across the board

(Update: In connection with Hermes's entry, be sure to read the VFR entry on the subject, and particularly Mark J's comments.)

Over at Wise Man's Heart, Hermes has [finally! ;)] put up another great post. I recommend that you go read it, as well as the lengthy comments he's gotten to the post. All of it is good. Some of it is a little more negative than my personal attitude generally will abide, but it's all good, as I said, and well worth the read.

But I'd like to focus my attention on one aspect Hermes brings out in the post, and to ask Hermes (or anyone else who has the answer) one of those politically incorrect questions that many of us seem to shy away from asking...

First of all, let me say that I do admit a little disappointment at going to Hermes's blog and finding that no new entry has been added in awhile. But why? Because of the quality of his posts. In other words, Hermes, I'm learning quickly that the quality of your posts makes it well worth my while to check your blog for new entries on a regular basis.

Now, I have to ask the politically incorrect question. Hermes mentions that he and his fellow medical students were required to take an IQ exam prior to being admitted to medical school. The question is this: Do you know whether the standards with regard to the IQ exam are different concerning "minorities?" For instance, when I was in the Air Force years ago, I learned from two female co-workers (an African American, and a Cuban American) that the grade requirements for acceptance into officer's training school were lower for them than they were for me, based, of course, on their minority status.

This knowledge precipitated a heated exchange between myself and the ladies mentioned wherein the bottom of their argument was that this policy was acceptable because they didn't have the same educational opportunities that I had growing up. My response to this nonsense was simply this: If you think I had more "educational" opportunities than you had growing up, you are sadly mistaken and deluded. Indeed, and as I further argued, what they were saying in actuality was that it was they, not I, who had more educational advantages given them (not earned), and those perceived advantages for them would follow them around for the rest of their lives. But the higher point was that by lowering the standards for entry into officer's training school, this could do nothing but lower the overall quality of the leadership of the U.S. Military, which, of course, results in a sub-par military; at very least a sub-par officer corps.

Now, I don't recall whether the conversation ever got around to discovering whether this disparity in standards (one reason for this is because the conversation got cut short when accusations of bigotry and racism were carelessly cast about concerning another co-worker who was arguing the same points I was, just a little more forcefully, and who was called before the commander who ultimately determined that there would be no more talk of different standards applying to different groups) applied to different groups carried over into the actual grading of achievement once a minority applicant was actually admitted by a lower standard, but it seems to me that to be consistent in the lowering of such standards, that this would have to be the case, or the final outcome.

So once again, the question is this: Do any of you know whether different IQ requirements, and/or, different grading standards are applied within the medical field to applicants and students enjoying "minority" status? Quality in the medical field is superior to quantity of minority applicants accepted. And you can quote me on that.

As I recently explained to my gymnast daughter (who has shown a capacity for making most of the requirements of the next level, albeit somewhat inconsistently at this point), who wants to advance to the next level so badly she can taste it, and has expressed that she hopes her instructors will move her up: "Your instructors don't determine when you advance; you determine when you advance, and don't you ever forget it." The point being this, that irregardless of what she achieves or doesn't achieve in gymnastics or anything else, I don't want her ever thinking her achievements based in anything other than a combination of God-given talents and hard work on her part in developing those talents. I certainly will never encourage such an attitude in any of my children. And those of you that do, or will, should be ashamed of yourselves! And you can quote me on that as well.

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No Taxation Without Enhancification

Okay, maybe I'm citing too many of Auster's entries lately, but I simply could not pass on this one because it discusses one of my pet peeves...

I certainly don't agree with, nor do I like the idea of taxing one class of people for the purpose of eliminating self-esteem issues of another class of people, which seems to be the idea here. But I'm mainly concerned with the false concept that outward appearances determine the level of one's internal self-esteem. That seems to be at the bottom here.

I've run into this problem numerous times within my own circle, and it's a fairly conservative circle by comparison. And my advice or counsel is always to be careful about entertaining the liberal bassackwards philosophy that says the external leads to the internal. Why is this my advice to those who ask it in one way or the other? Because, as I explain to them over and over (but this usually falls on deaf ears), invariably you will find that ultimately self-esteem is not enhanced, nor self-esteem issues eliminated by external means. It is the internal that leads to the external. One's self-esteem is not determined by the way one looks, but by the way one acts; by the content of one's character, to borrow from MLK.

Ultimately self-esteem is destroyed by this idea of enhancing one's features to increase self-esteem, not the other way around.

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