Reality Insists

Europe and the United States acting in concert can best deal with China and Russia's advance, and the instability brought by radical Islam. Reality insists that alone, the Americans and Europeans have growing disadvantages in a world where the rule of law and democracy are not serving as controls over newly distributed economic and political power.

It's a tenet of Psych 101 that our environment is in our heads, that we don't react to reality but rather to the reality that we perceive, and since our perceptions are colored by preconception and expectation, one man's reality isn't necessarily the same as another's. Taking on faith that most adult humans are not schizophrenic, I believe that we share a common reality at root, one that is empirically demonstrable in its physics at bottom. For someone to assert their reality as being universal without qualm should slow down one's clue train akin to light waves in a Bose-Einsten condensate. That is to say, "Whoa." In this case a journalist writing in a mouthpiece for the left, the International Herald Tribune being patch-up of the NYT and the Washington Post, can be assumed to be of the community-based reality, AKA reality-based community. His slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am grounding of the situation at hand as required by dictates of reality-as-the-left-sees-it is flaccid beyond Viagran resurrection. The issue requires more examination that allowed in "reality insists." As to this...

in a world where the rule of law and democracy are not serving as controls over newly distributed economic and political power.

I felt the same despair when the USSR shot down the South Korean airliner in the 1980s. How could we prevail against a nation with neither scruples nor a care for humanity? How could we compete with a centrally planned economy? As it turned out, the USSR's internal deformations capped their ability to compete and the edifice was not far from being collapsed. What we see from China today is little different. The irony here is that, in the face of what looked a difficult fight at the time, Gaullist France pulled out of NATO and tried to make separate peace with the bear. This French ex-prime minister sees the need for a new NATO (what's wrong with the old one?) and chokes a distant chicken. As for Islam, uniting with the EU, as Mark Steyn noted, would "consign the last functioning part of western civilization to the pathologies that have doomed most of the rest. "