The Daily View: Turkey, Isolationism, & Islam

How to Carve a Turkey – Begin with Airstrikes.

This Thanksgiving, it looks like the biggest turkey of all is Turkey, for f-ing up big time in striking down that Russian warplane. For those who want to bet against Turkey’s continued economic decline, short TUR. Things are going to get worse. That’s what happens when you have a low-IQ country where incompetence isn’t punished.

In the years following the second Bush administration, isolationism has become popular among the right, but after some consideration, I realize it may be bad policy.

Isolationism ‘protects’ those who have nothing to lose. Businesses that have foreign customers don’t want war to breakout, and then policy makers to do nothing as the economy falls apart. People with property don’t want their homes and businesses devastated by terrorists.

If you want to ‘focus on the economy’, that means protecting foreign economic interests. If major trade partners are engaged in war, it will have economic ramifications in America.

Some say if we ‘pull out’ and cut ties to Israel, Islamic terrorism will go away.

Radicalized Islam (which is tautology) has claimed far more lives, caused much more destruction than radicalized Christianity – the ‘kill count’ is not even close. Islam comes way ahead.

It’s not just about Israel – Muslims attack all over the world, from Spain, to France, and even Australia. They will even attack other Muslims who aren’t radicalized enough. Just take a look at a list of recent Islamist terrorist attacks, modern causalities in Islam’s endless war against the ‘infidel’ going as far back as the first millennium. Only some of them involve territory of Israel and Palestine. The belief Muslims are going to stop terrorizing because we adopt isolationism, is delusional. The ‘neo atheist’ movement, which includes Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, is right its criticism of Islam as being an affront to Western civilization, intellectual discourse, and fundamental human rights.

The biggest problem with isolationism is that it relegates America to the role of defense, allowing the enemy to buildup with impunity and keep striking over and over. Just because we adopt isolationism, doesn’t mean our enemies will. If we’re going to spend all this money on the military, may as well use it. Right now, with the recent terrorist attacks on France the, tide may be turning against isolationism. France’s response of airstrikes against Isis was met with much approval by the right. Isolationism doesn’t work with Islamic terror. You have to treat it like an infestation and get rid of it. When a building is on fire, do you just wait for the fire to go out? No, you marshal the fire department to put it out; otherwise, it spreads and gets worse.

Also, proactive foreign policy and border control need not be mutually exclusive.

But now, on another tangent, why does the left love Islam? It boils down to to Hobbes and Rousseau, both of whom believe the natural state of man is savagery, which is a view also shared by many on the welfare left. The welfare left believe the world is doomed because of institutional ‘racism’, technology, capitalism, and wealth inequality, so the left’s natural ideological ally is Islam, because Islam wants to bring the world back to its natural, egalitarian, ‘noble’ savage state, liberated from ‘racism’, technology, wealth inequality, and other ‘ills’ of modern Western Civilization. Like Hobbes, the welfare left has a very pessimistic view of human nature.