Islamic analysis

Rants and Raves has a sharp and interesting essay on Arabs and tribalism and what he found out by living in Saudi for a year. A sample:

1) They don’t think the same way we do.

No, I mean THEY REALLY DON'T THINK THE SAME WAY WE DO.
***
3) Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source.

And you know what? Theirs is PHONY.

So I just had to comment, based on observing my sister's attitude after living among Muslims for almost ten years now and my own observations from a mere ten days, but an interesting ten days, in Egypt:

Excellent. The amazing thing is that so many Westerners can live among Arabs for years and fail to grasp the obvious facts you lay out.

I gleaned an interesting factoid from Spengler's The Decline of the West: the rise of Islamic civilization was largely traceable to the role of Jews, who were especially important in Moorish Spain. Arabs were as dependent on Jews then as they are on Westerners now. I believe many educated Arabs realize this and know that when they kicked all the Jews out of Arab lands, who then mostly went to Israel, they doomed themselves to social and cultural primitivism. This despair makes a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian problem impossible.

Analogy?

Thinking of the idiocy that is global warming theory, I was reminded of another collectivist delusion. Communists and fascists have long thought that a government can run an economy more efficiently than the free market. All it takes is massive amounts of computing power and the right theory, which they figured was handed to them by Marx or Hitler or Mussolini. How complex could it be? And for decades, seven in the case of Russian Communism, economies were massively screwed up, with hardly enough money produced for military needs. North Korea today is the poster child for the success of central economic planning.
Apparently collectivists cannot let go of their obsession with central planning. After losing on the economy, costing many millions of lives, they've turned their attention to the weather. Just put enough computers together with really smart people and not only can we come up with a theory that will convince people that the earth is in danger, but we can show them how to save the planet by simply turning their economic prosperity over to the weatherman computer geek. Right, the same computer geek who can't tell you within a thousand years when the local volcano is going to erupt next. And the same one who can't tell you within five degrees what the temperature will be five days from now.