Ypp, a regular commenter here at Gates of Vienna, offers the following thoughts prompted by a post I wrote last week. His essay was little too long and off-topic for the comments, so he asked me to post it separately.
by Ypp
Recently I saw a picture from one of the US cable channels which was supposed to represent one of the Muslim countries, which one is now irrelevant. Guess what they showed? It was a couple of huge minaret towers.
It made me recall what I learned from TV and in school about other countries. France is of course the Eiffel tower. England — the tower of Parliament with Big Ben. Moscow is represented by the Ostankino TV tower and the Kremlin towers. Berlin also had a TV tower, though lower than that in Moscow. And I realized that in the progressive mind the only thing worth doing is to build a tower. One whose tower is the highest becomes the first among others in the progressive world.
Now another story. In his recent post about Holland, Baron wrote that Holland allow immigrants not to learn Dutch, and that reminds him of the Tower of Babel. Mixing languages was exactly the reason why the builders of the Tower failed.
But what is the Tower itself, what will be ruined by that mixing? Is it a multicultural society? No, multicultural society is the one where languages have already mixed, so it is already a failure.
Does the Tower means the great economic achievements? Or the great Empire of completely equal citizens with arbitrary culture?
Now connecting those two stories. Progressives and liberals claim that 9/11 was caused by the lack of communication. I think that to the progressive mind the communication was meant to be as follows: Hey guys, you are building towers and we are building towers. We are alike, why can't we build them together? Why don't you understand our language? Maybe, it will help if we learn yours? Why don't you understand us???!!!
I can't stop being amazed how the 3,000 year old story is being repeated today. And how some people fail to learn from it.
blogagog said...
perhaps this explains why Airbus never turns a profit.
And I realized that in the progressive mind the only thing worth doing is to build a tower.
Note the word 'Progressive'. It was a political movement to discard the 'old ways', ancient traditions of 'nobilitily' and stagnated traditions. Sound good, doesn't it?
Actually it's so good that it's worth building a political system upon and forcing progress on the citizens, regardless if they desire it or not. Then it turns into some variant of fascism. That's the darker side of Progressivism.
The lighter side of building tower is to demonstrate that people can achieve something by building together, like the television tower in Berlin, Space Needle (is that Toronto) and of course the now relatively small Eiffel Tower (Eiffel was of German family, BTW).
Towers demonstrate unity and achievement, be it by free men or by coercion. The failure of the Tower of Babylon demonstrate what happens when both unity and coercion are lacking and things fall apart. Great symbolism.
Peggy Snow Cahill said...
"Space Needle (is that Toronto)"
The Space Needle is Seattle. The one in Toronto is the CN Tower.
Whoever has the tallest tower wins, even if it means sticking a bloody long pole at the top....I wonder who thought of that.
The real towers in consideration here—and mentioned only in passing—are not observation decks or broadcast antennae, they are skyscrapers. All base Freudian interpretations aside, the skyscraper represents, literally, a pinnacle of human achievement.
What better way to exalt the earth that to give untold thousands of offices such a small footprint? A fully assembled moon-lander or shuttle launch vehicle represent some of the only competition with respect to the engineering challenges of building structures that currently reach over half a kilometer in height.
Structures of this size require—not just seismic precautions—but aerodynamic stabilization. Ordinary wind conditions can cause sufficient displacement at the top of tall buildings to induce motion sickness in people Taipei 101—currently the world's tallest building—utilizes a 728 TON tuned mass damper to counteract building sway. During a recent Chinese earthquake the system's operation was captured on this incredible video. Watching a 728 Ton weight move several feet back and forth illustrates the mind-bending amounts of force released in an earthquake. This web site has an informative animation demonstrating how such systems work.
Those of you who have read Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" will understand why these tall structures rank as some of mankind's most profound creations. A quote of hers goes directly to the heart of this article's central theme:
From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.
— Ayn Rand —
Witness how quality commercial television programming—an oxymoron at best—is cluttered with such tripe volcanoes as "The Love Boat", "Baywatch" (one of the most widely viewed programs in all history) and "Squeal of Fortune". It is the result of Lowest Common Denominator Programming. Obtaining the biggest Nielsen Ratings requires dumbing down content to an elementary school level.
Multiculturalism involves an identically destructive process. By leveling all cultures to the same base plane as the most primitive savages, a vicious attack is launched upon the principal threat to both savage and Multiculturalist alike, namely, human reason. Multiculturalism simply cannot withstand even brief exposure to the sunlight of a reasoning mind. It is an embodiment of mindlessness. An unthinking rote mentality that does not hesitate in using brute force to quell any and all challenges to its supremacy.
One needs only to witness Politically Correct thought's maleficent assault upon Free Speech to comprehend how rationality threatens Multiculturalism. That it seeks to protect the obvious and virulent evil of Islam stands as stark testimony to how dangerous the Lowest Common Cultural Denominator frame of reference is to civilization.
A brief examination of modern Liberalism's pet projects makes clear its ultimate goal.
Global Warmening
All of these deeply flawed and delusional mindsets lie at the core of a self-loathing, anti-human agenda specifically designed to reverse centuries of progress and human achievement. Just as Liberals have halted all advances in the peaceful use of nuclear power, so would they see the demolition of all skyscrapers for desecrating their impossibly pristine environmental dreams.