The Sparrow Hawk speaks I'm much more comfortable speaking about the past than the present. The present is complicated, and people actually care about it. People don't psychoanalyze me to death over my perspective on why the Roman Republic fell. This post from WJ Phillips intrigues me:

Razib- I sense in much of your and your colleagues' more intemperate and Manichaean pronouncements a feeling that you have to overcompensate (110% American!) because you or your family burned their boats to become US citizens. The phenomenon of the marginal person becoming superpatriotic is all too familiar: Hitler the Austrian as echt Deutsch, Stalin the Georgian lauding all things Russian, even De Valera the Spanish American emerging as an Irish chieftain. I'm not suggesting you are about to seize power and rule as a totalitarian dictator, but please don't keep flogging this "We are right, they are evil maniacs/primitive wackos" line. It doesn't sit well with the moral claim of Americanism to be distinguished from other nations by its magnanimity (in the literal sense of the word), and it doesn't impress the rest of us on the right-hand shore of Western Civ. Like it or not, a degree of what is grandly called moral equivalence- what we in poor old decadent socialistic Blighty call seeing things from the other fellow's point of view- is essential even on the pragmatic grounds of knowing thine enemy

Did you read the article that I posted from Salon? Again, let me ask, did you read the article!?!?!?! This is from Salon, not the National Review! I never said America was paradise. Hell no! But compared to what is depicted in the media out there-which might be an American conspiracy against the Arabs, yes true.... A little personal history. Until 9/11 I was a mild isolationist. Until the age of 21, I had a Green Card and only applied for citizenship because my father threatened to not pay my tuition that term. I am not a militarist. I abhor a militaristic society, because it is generally a threat to liberty. It is liberty that I love above all principles. It is within the context of liberty that free inquiry and dialogue can occur. Western civilization is now a social conversation. Islamic civilization is a social edict, get it? I'm not a patriot, I'm a libertariot. America and liberty just happen to go together compared to the sorry alternatives out there (yeah, I'm looking to the right-hand side of the West). Let me be on the record on this question: though I'm sad about all the injustice in the world, I would let them be if America could stay the proud and free republic it is (was?). I'm not a Derbyshirean pessimist about European democracies, but they and other European-derived nations too often say things like "We respect free speech, but we don't worship it." Fuck that. Liberty, a means to an end, or the end? I am not a big believer in the naive pronouncements of the "proposition nation." But here on the left-hand side of Western civilization, it is plausible to be colored and say that one is American. Is it plausible to say that one is colored and German or French? I wish it were, but it seems like those on the right-hand side, even the British, still hew strongly to blood. For all our religious conservatism, which I'm not a big fan of, we have no established church. We might think the Scientologists are weird wacks, but we don't suppress them as a cult. We might have political correctness, but we're less schizophrenic than the Europeans, with their tears for black Americans on death row and love for interracial marriage, but surprising right-wing nationalistic political feeling. We don't sue Yahoo for selling Nazi related stuff - what the hell do we have to do with Nazis anyway? We didn't spawn them, we didn't collaborate, and we didn't appease them. Look, I'll stop dumping on Europe. I have relatives in England and Germany. They're successful professionals generally. But I get the impression they'll never feel English or German. My dad is a card-carrying Democrat because of his general socialist political beliefs-he's still right-wing on moral issues. He's active in his homeowners association and one of my mom's best friend's in a black woman named "LeShande." It could just be them, perhaps their fellow citizens love them more than other colored people from foreign shores, I don't know. But I have been to Bangladesh (visited after I left), and I'm hell as glad I live in this country. I like America the way it is (anything could be better of course) and I don't want it to change to accommodate the teeming masses of the Third World. Liberty. Sexual and political freedom. Religious diversity. The right to bear arms. The right to hate your government but love your country. So many things that I take for granted. So many things that I didn't think about when I was an isolationist. But 9/11 changed that. I have an uncle, he's got a goat-beard and he's a scary fucking Muslim fundamentalist. He's a nuisance to most of my family, bitching at the women to cover-up and berating their husbands for letting them walk around by themselves. We're not an island anymore, and yeah, I'd take up arms to keep people like my uncle from getting a toe-hold in this new world. Islamic theocracies, Latin American oligarchies and Asian despotisms could rot for all I care, while their best and the brightest could come to the United States and flourish. But now I feel that we can't be a splendid island in the midst of the barbarity. We have to take it to them. I thought I'd left that crap behind, but now it's flying across the ocean and crashing into buildings. Stuff like the Salon article makes me sad. I mean, what planet do these people live on? I even see it in my own family (who are not Arabs, but Muslims). They sometimes see American conspiracy in anything that smacks of danger to the Islamic world. I don't know. Where does it come from? It's a Judeo-American conspiracy, yeah, computer chips in Muslim brains that make them hate America, so it's not their fault. All I know is that I don't want us to become like the European countries that have insidious fundamentalist infections lurking in their midsts. If I do have a daughter, I sure as hell don't want her to have ward off the glare of some flat-faced slattern in a burqua because she thinks my daughter is "loose" [1]. I sure as hell don't want one of my sons being attracted to some Islamo-Fascist cult and getting it into his head that his sister is dishonoring the family. What America is, what the West is, is special. The Rights of Man. The Rights of Woman. The Right to Believe. The Right to be free to be. Would you pick up a gun for that? Come on. Be honest. Look at yourself, hell if you're wearing a grimy t-shirt and have a pony-tail, how many fatwas have you already broken? I'll be straight. I don't give a damn about Arab democracies or Pakistani politics. I care about America. What we believe, we believe is best for our country. And yes, I'm sorry, but I think this country is the last best hope for liberty. That's my foundational belief, my axiom, my faith. You can disagree, but you know where I stand, you know where the vitriol comes from. I come from a land with little liberty, now that I've won it - by the grace of God, by my father's brains or by sheer dumb luck - I'm not going to watch to slide into the vast ocean of despotic human history. I was an isolationist...I thought the rest of the world could go to hell, but we'd float to safety on life-boat of liberty. I was stupid. I was wrong. Any of you have the guts to admit the same of yourselves? No, you're way more thoughtful and well-read no doubt. Yeah. P.S. Being raised between two cultures and seeing bizarro Islam and how it makes you bend your will toward some code of laws thought up by bedouins shooting the shit in some tent in the middle of no-where, I might have some idea of what terror awaits us if we relax our guard a little better than most. Also, I don't think thoughtful doves are evil. We all have contributions to make, and some of the extreme hawks are getting way too carried away. I don't want to save the world, just a preserve a piece of this world for liberty's sons and daughters. If my rhetoric or sentiment seems a bit overwrought, it's not out of hate but out of fear for what we might lose, love for the freedoms I have. Oh, and for those who are curious toward my leanings, I took the "Revolution" tests over the past week. Five times I was:
What revolution are You?
Made by altern_active And once the:
What revolution are You?
Made by altern_active [1] I will also threaten to beat the shit out of any young man who wants to touch my daughter, but I'll only threaten. That's the American way. In the end, she's free to make her own decisions, even if it does give her old man a heart attack. Godless adds: If Razib's motivations are born of a fiery passion for liberty, mine are born of a coldly calculating interest in wealth and knowledge. Unlike Razib, I was not an isolationist before 9/11. But I was not much of a patriot. My interests were in science, and I felt that my work could (in principle) be done anywhere. I imagined mathematics and science to be eternal and abstract, free of national boundaries and the petty quibbles of man. America was the best place in the world to pursue my work, but I had no particular passion for the country or the flag. All that changed when I realized that people were willing to kill me simply because I was an American citizen. It was something of a rude shock for me to realize that my work did not happen in a vaccum; yes, I could move to Singapore or Europe or India to pursue my research, but would another nation be ready to defend the liberties I take for granted? Would another nation defend my right to think, to learn, to listen, and to create? I think not. Europe's core is rotten - it is being eaten from within. Russia is yet weak, Japan is tottering on the brink of financial ruin, and in any case neither country has much of a record of defending liberal democracy. America is the world's only hope against the barbarism of radical Islam and the ruthlessness of an ascendant China, and if America falls, so too does science as I know it.