Josh Marshall is a Fucking Genius.

"I'd say we, or rather they, may be about set to have their Reformation. Or they may already be in thick of it."

If this is American liberalism, just shoot me and get it over with.

Yes it's the Islamic reformation. It's the fucking Islamic renaissance. We're witnessing the modernization and secularization of Islam. It's been building for decades, going on for years, and our stupidity is helping in an unnecessarily messy and dangerous way to bring things to a head. This has been obvious for a long time. Al Qaeda was always the end of something, not the beginning.
---

Meanwhile, some fun at Tapped.

The liberal elite has more in common with educated libertarians than with working people and the liberal political elite is made up more of economists and political 'scientists' than historians and professors of literature. "Analysis" and rationalism are hip, history and culture even as viewed in anthropological rather than esthetic terms, are not. "Progress" is a value even when its meaning remains undefined: is it low infant mortality or the number of plasma TV's?

Rather than making bargains with a libertarian minority, better and more egalitarian to work with the large number of moderate social conservatives on the economic concerns they share with the left and endeavor to educate them, without condescension, on why they have nothing to fear from outsiders.

Libertarians are a self-styled elite who like to pretend that they exist as windowed monads. Someone should explain to me what freedom is when before I am able to communicate I need to learn to speak, and preferably to do so well. Libertarians think it takes more intelligence and shows more moral worth to invent a new musical instrument than learn to play one that already exists. Why bother trying to learn to play the violin when it sounds just fine to me already?
And the [slightly more successful] corollary: Why do I have to grow up when I'm a mathematical genius?

The world outside our perceptions is ruled by numbers, the one we live in is ruled by language. Ayn Rand will not show you the way out, and "freedom" is the domain of sociopaths and gurgling infants rolling around in their own shit.

This debate under false pretenses is deluded and self-serving The stupidity is mind-boggling