L.B.: Willful stupidity

Left Behind, pp. 412-414 (a few days late)

Imagine trying to convince yourself that curling and cricket were more popular in the U.S. than baseball and (American) football.

It wouldn't be easy. You'd have to ignore massive evidence to the contrary while also overlooking the lack of any supporting evidence. Every time you walked down the street, you'd have to come up with some explanation or evasion for all those people you saw in baseball caps and football jerseys as well as for all the people you didn't see in licensed apparel for cricket and curling teams. You could never watch Sports Center on ESPN. You could never pick up a newspaper or even walk near a newsstand. But your best efforts to shield yourself from all of that evidence could never be 100-percent effective (or 100-percent unconscious), so you'd also have to concoct increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories about why so many people pretended to follow football and baseball while millions of others apparently disguised their passion for curling and cricket.

That would be a lot of work. It would be difficult to do that much work without it being at least somewhat deliberate. This is the problem with any extensive self-deception -- part of your self is necessarily engaged in the act of deceiving and is therefore aware of and immune to it.

This same kind of deliberate evasion and willing self-deception is what it must take for Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins to be able to persuade themselves of all the strange things they claim to believe about the United Nations.

To summarize what we've previously seen, the authors of Left Behind apparently claim to believe that the U.N. is a kind of global federation, something along the lines of the Federation of Planets in Star Trek. Every member nation is thus subject and subordinate to this higher, larger, more authoritative global body. Ruling over all is the secretary-general -- the king of kings and lord of lords who wields more power and influence than any mere head of state. The secretary-general is thus the precursor to the coming Antichrist and the U.N. is a precursor to his One World Government. (As with much of premillennial dispensationalism, this is an explicit perversion of mainstream eschatology and the "now and not yet" doctrine of the kingdom of God.)

The authors' disproportionate sense of the U.N.'s importance and their utter ignorance of its actual role and function cannot be easy to maintain. How do you convince yourself that a topic is of unrivaled significance while simultaneously preventing yourself from learning anything about it? To maintain their beliefs about the U.N., the authors need to avoid all newspapers, magazines and television. Failing that, they also have to devise theories that would make pretty much everyone who isn't them complicit in a conspiracy of silence masking the supposed "true" nature of the supra-national global authority.

But no matter how intricate or comprehensive such theories are, the authors can never rest. Unreality cannot withstand the ever-present and unavoidable contact with actual reality, so the lie must always be reinforced and reconstructed. It must be exhausting. Consider what happens when Tim LaHaye stumbles across a magazine profile of the current secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon. If he really believes that this man is supreme ruler of the world and not merely a toothless diplomatic figurehead, then it would be irresponsible not to read the article and thereby learn as much as possible about the supposedly Most Powerful Man on Earth. But some part of LaHaye will also realize that such an encounter with reality would be fatal to the beliefs he is struggling to maintain. He knows -- knows -- that he cannot allow himself to read that article if he wants to continue believing the things he wants to continue believing. In other words, he knows -- or at least some part of him knows -- that the things he wants to continue believing are not true.

Whether we call it denial or compartmentalization or cognitive dissonance or willful stupidity, this deliberate self-deception plays a huge role in the authors' view not just of the United Nations, but of the entire world. Left Behind is marked throughout with touches of the overly aggressive sincerity that masks not just unacknowledged doubt, but the unacknowledged knowledge that what they are saying can't be true. This not-quite-successful embrace of contradictions is, for instance, what allows the authors to assert that they are certain the world will come to an end very soon while simultaneously investing their profits in long-term investments and estate planning.

That's a rather long and winding introduction to the passage we're about to examine from LB, but it seemed necessary due to the astonishingly strange and impossible things this passage simply assumes to be true about the United Nations, journalists, pacifists and the entire world.

Nicolae Carpathia is about to announce that he's taking over the world. Buck Wiliams knew this announcement would be happening this very afternoon, but in his new capacity as executive editor of a national newsmagazine he decided that instead of witnessing the event firsthand in Manhattan, he would spend the day hanging out with the staff of his regional Midwest office. But then Buck already knows all about Carpathia's plans and the machinations that allowed him to come to power. In exchange for that inside scoop, he has already promised both Carpathia and Steve Plank that Global Weekly won't report any of it.

Buck camped out in Lucinda Washington's old office, interviewing key people at 20-minute intervals. He also told each about his writing assignment and asked their personal theories of what had happened. ...

More than a week ago (despite its name, GW seems to have the leisurely lead time of a quarterly) Buck was assigned to report on the biggest event in the history of the world. His research so far has consisted of the unsolicited opinions of a doctor in an airport lounge and interviews with two pilots (one chartered, one commercial). Now he is conducting man-on-the-street interviews with his own staff. Buck's idea of reporting doesn't involve shoe-leather or even working the phone. He's working the office intercom. This makes New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's research method -- serendipitous interviews with implausibly quotable cab-drivers -- seem thorough by comparison.

"Near the end of the day," CNN cuts away from Dan Bennett's 24/7 coverage of Chantapalooza at the Western Wall to announce Carpathia's election as Supreme World Leader. Lucinda apparently didn't spring for cable in her newsroom, so Buck invites the staff into her office to watch the report:

"Romanian president Nicolae Carpathia was catapulted into reluctant leadership of the United Nations by a nearly unanimous vote. Carpathia, who insisted on sweeping changes in direction and jurisdiction of the United Nations, in what appeared an effort to gracefully decline the position, became secretary-general here just moments ago."

The apparent "effort to gracefully decline the position" is, of course, a charade. We learned about this earlier when Plank briefed his former colleagues on Carpathia's strategic pose as the humble, reluctant leader. This is a crude attempt to describe a real phenomenon -- such a pose of reluctance is a common tactic employed by some of the least humble, most ambitious political power-seekers. That tactic is rarely as successful in real life as it is here. The authors portray every other diplomat on earth as gullible rubes wholly taken in by Carpathia's clumsy theatrics. Just how gullible becomes clearer when you consider the full extent of those "sweeping changes ... in jurisdiction" that Nicolae made a condition of his "reluctant" acceptance of global sovereignty.

The nameless CNN reporter cuts to an interview with departing secretary-general T'Challa of Wakanda Mwangati Ngumo of Botswana, who seems to indicate that he has remained the leader of that nation throughout his tenure at the U.N.:

"I have long been aware that divided loyalties between my country and the United Nations have made me less effective in each role. I had to choose, and I am first and foremost a Motswana. ..."

Carpathia, likewise, will apparently retain his role as president of Romania while serving as secretary-general. The authors don't see this as noteworthy. They seem to assume that this is standard procedure. One wonders if they believed that Boutros Boutros-Ghali -- secretary-general when this volume was written in 1995 -- was also the Egyptian president (or, as they probably think of that post, "pharaoh").

Then, almost as an afterthought, the CNN reporter turns to Carpathia's oddball list of demands/reforms:

"In only a matter of hours, every request Carpathia had outlined in an early morning press conference was moved as official business, voted upon, and ratified by the body. Within a year the United Nations headquarters will move to New Babylon. The makeup of the Security Council will change to 10 permanent members within the month, and a press conference is expected Monday morning in which Carpathia will introduce several of his personal choices for delegates to that body."

Where to start? The relocation plan is dazzlingly arbitrary. It would've been less strange if Carpathia had instead insisted that the U.N. headquarters be repainted mint green and mauve. ("Well, I'd do the Reichstag bathroom in purples and gold ...")Try to imagine some candidate for president of the United States expressing that he would condescend to grudgingly accept the office, but only on the condition that the capital be relocated from the District of Columbia to the Badlands of South Dakota. The idea is so bizarre that it would be impossible to know how to respond, but surely part of that response would be to ask, "Why there?" No one in LB asks this. The diplomats of the U.N. just cheerfully start packing boxes, apparently eager to leave Manhattan for the exciting environs of an archaeological site in the deserts of Iraq.

Buck and his fellow "journalists" at GW aren't the least bit curious about the hows or whys of this move. Buck already has some idea that Carpathia's sponsors have a financial interest in New Babylon and that this is, in part, a corrupt and blatant real estate development scheme -- but he has, of course, already promised not to report on any of that. His colleagues simply seem to have accepted their role as extras in an End Times novel and thus are comfortable with the authors' notion that the Fulfillment of Prophecy doesn't have to make sense.

The reconstitution of the Security Council would seem like an even bigger deal except that, as we're about to see, Carpathia's remaining condition renders the existence and function of that council irrelevant. As outlandish as both of those "sweeping changes" are, the least plausible part of this passage might actually be the idea that the United Nations was able to act on this entire agenda in a single morning. Arbitrary relocations and global surrender are one thing, but efficiency and unanimity? From the U.N.?

After all of this, the CNN reporter finally gets to his buried lede: The assembled diplomats at the U.N. have, without consultation with their respective governments, begun discussing their unconditional surrender and the elevation of Carpathia to global Caesar:

"There is no guarantee, of course, that even member nations will unanimously go along with the move to destroy 90 percent of their military strength and turn over the remaining 10 percent to the U.N. But several ambassadors expressed their confidence 'in equipping and arming an international peacekeeping body with a thoroughgoing pacifist and committed disarmament activist as its head.'"

The alleged pacifist demands a global monopoly on the use of force -- what's not to trust?

These two sentences may be among the stupidest ever written in the English language. The authors here misuse and misunderstand so many words and concepts -- "pacifist," "nations," "member nations," "the U.N.," "ambassadors," "international," "peacekeeping body" -- that I'm not even sure this counts as the English language.

We'll unpack this astonishingly awful passage at greater length on Friday when we turn to Buck's colleague's response to Carpathia's announcement. That response illustrates an even more dismaying aspect of L&J's deliberate, willful stupidity: Not only have they chosen to pretend to believe many ridiculous and impossible ideas about the United Nations, but they cite these beliefs as support for an even more ridiculous and impossible set of ideas that they have chosen to pretend to believe about the pernicious liberals who don't share their animosity to this imaginary U.N.

Comments

[zzyzx]

SWEEEEEEEEP!

HURRY HARD!

Curling! W00T!

[Cary Bleasdale]

I suppose...and this is being far, far, far more generous than they could ever deserve- they might think of it in this way. Global Crisis (even though it isn't) Global Panic (even though their isn't) Global Economic Crisis/War/Famine (even though there isn't, isn't, isn't) would bring people together (like 9/11 on a global scale...though it isn't) and they would turn to the UN as the only global body around, giving it massive power. Thus, the UN wasn't always powerful, but (being a liberal/demonic institution that supports birth control) since all of it's delegates are still in place, while tons of other heads of state are missing, hey, lets vest it with a metric shitton of power.

Now, one could construe a fascinating story, about global politics and mass psychology out of that supposition.

Or, on the other hand, you could be LaHay and Jenkins and...you know. Not do that.

[Zonko]

Yeah! Left Behind...Tuesdays?

If Carpathia were already global dictator (should I call you Dick? Or Mr. Tator?) then moving the HQ and changing the council would be relatively plausible, but he hasn't even been in office yet.

And, of course, no one is ever giving up 10% of their weapons, much less blowing up the other 90%. Not to mention how bad that could be for the economy, which should already be shattered due to the loss of huge numbers of consumers, producers, and middle-men. What happens to all of the maintenance people, the weapon manufacturers and researchers, and obviously everyone employed by the various armies? A 10%-armed global army wouldn't cover all of that, not considering any RTCs who went to the great nude beach in the sky.

[practicallyevil]

destroy 90 percent of their military strength and turn over the remaining 10 percent to the U.N.

Iceland, just never mind, we don't want body parts or anything.

[Sarah]

Left Behind Friday on a Tuesday! Joy!

I read these books several years ago, and now I'm wondering how I swallowed any of this... of course, I was eleven at the time, but that's hardly an excuse.

[hapax]

What happens to all of the maintenance people, the weapon manufacturers and researchers, and obviously everyone employed by the various armies?

They run out and get pregnant, in order to make sure the abortionists keep getting their paychecks?

[Thalia]

What are they going to DO with the 10% of the weapons? I mean, yeah, I know, use them against the unarmed citizenry of the One World Nation, but really, if everyone has agreed to, in essence, totally disarm, what does the U.N. need weapons FOR? Against the UFO's? Or maybe they'll respond instantly to rabid dog and wild bear calls all over the world?

[Jesurgislac]

Imagine trying to convince yourself that curling and cricket were more popular in the U.S. than baseball and (American) football.

Imagine trying to convince yourself that the majority of people in the US are anti-choice and will support making abortion illegal.

It would've been less strange if Carpathia had instead insisted that the U.N. headquarters be repainted mint green and mauve. ("Well, I'd do the Reichstag bathroom in purples and gold ...")

Thank you for linking to the Monty Python sketch...

[Spalanzani]

The ridiculous inaccuracies and implausibilities in Left Behind sort of remind me of Look Around You, a parody of childrens' science education programs. Of course, in Look Around You, the off-hand references to absurd and impossible "facts" is done intentionally for humor.

[damnedyankee]

Secretary General T'Challa of Wakanda would've freakin' owned!

10% of those hella cool vibranium gadgets ain't goin' nowhere outside of Wakanda, btw, no matter what the King of the World says.

[Brandi]

Curling can be fuckin' metal.

Damn.

This is the most lucid dissection of the whole UN = one world government thing that I've ever read. Must be awful to be Tim LaHaye. His crimestop centers must be working overtime.

[Richard Hershberger]

Hey, I like cricket. I'm the only native-born American citizen of European ancestry I know who does, but that just makes me that much more special. No point here. Just saying...

[J]

Buck's idea of reporting doesn't involve shoe-leather or even working the phone. He's working the office intercom. This makes New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's research method -- serendipitous interviews with implausibly quotable cab-drivers -- seem thorough by comparison.

More abuse of Thomas Friedman, please! Seriously, why is he read? Why is he allowed to write? Fair-mindedness forces me to say that reasonable people can disagree about whether Bill Kristol deserves a slot in the NYT, but Friedman's problem isn't just his ideology, but his methodology: His ideas are all wrong and he can't research or communicate them very clearly.

[Dahne]

"There is no guarantee, of course, that even member nations will unanimously go along with the move to destroy 90 percent of their military strength and turn over the remaining 10 percent to the U.N."

That is the most brilliantly ludicrous understatement I believe I have ever seen.

Next, on CNN:

"There is no guarantee, of course, that a full contingent of mauve armadillos will fly out of my ass."

Hmm...so in this world, countries respond to a demand to disarm entirely with a, "Yeah, sure, that sounds like a good idea." And this is supposed to be with only the bad people left?

[J]

Oh and just to seed these items, re previous threads, in the most-active thread:

1.) Girls named Jezebel: Actually there are plenty of them around. It's just that rather than use the Hebrew insult (Jezebel=woman of dirt), they use the Phoenician original: Isabel (Ith'Baal=woman of the Lord).

2.) Goro Miyazaki's take on Earthsea ("Gedo Senkei"); no U.S. release until 2010 (!) says the guy at the local comic store. But fear not: You can watch the whole thing for free right here. Take THAT, Disney!

[Craig]

This same kind of deliberate evasion and willing self-deception is what it must take for Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins to be able to persuade themselves of all the strange things they claim to believe about the United Nations.

But that's just what the UN wants you to think!! Seriously, though, they wouldn't be much of an Illuminati if they couldn't control the media, the government, brainwash everyone except the Real True Christians, and rule the world with an iron fist that just happens to look like an especially floppy and harmless nerf bat.

[Dahne]

So will the weapons ban include cricket bats? Then what would people kill zombies with?

Really, with that example of doublethink in action, I think it depends on your ignorance. I, willingly knowing nothing about baseball besides that there's no crying in it, would find it...well, still fairly difficult to imagine that it's not the popular sport it is, since I suck royally at self-deception. But the less you know, the easier it would be to convince yourself that those stadiums full of cheering people that you are vaguely aware of and the broadcasts you have no interest in watching are for whatever you want it to be. A symbol on a hat could be for a soccer team just as well as anything.

Of course, that's until you mention it to somebody else, who will then point out your delusion. Seems like L&J somehow sidestepped that problem.

(And until you get a job at the Giants' stadium. Like I just did. Ha ha! Irony.)

These two sentences may be among the stupidest ever written in the English language. The authors here misuse and misunderstand so many words and concepts -- "pacifist," "nations," "member nations," "the U.N.," "ambassadors," "international," "peacekeeping body" -- that I'm not even sure this counts as the English language.

Reminds me of the recent brouhaha when some low-tier conservative pundit looking for something over which to get his knickers in a knot had his hearing aid pick up the words "video game" and "sex" in between soothing Muzak renditions of Toby Keith. Without being sidetracked by bedevilment like research or fact checking, which would have conspired to insinuate that the game in question, Mass Effect, was rated the equivalent of an R and contained a single, extremely tame, tasteful, and IMHO rather lovely scene, he ran to report the terrifying facts, by which I mean make a bunch of shit up. It was actually rather hilarious. You can track the point at which he stopped even cursory efforts at making any kind of sense and started stringing together random words that sounded bad. "Sodomy rape orgasm tittilation teenagers HILLARYCARE!"

(One good thing that came of the whole mess was, through people explaining what the game actually contained, the popularization of the term "alien sideboob.")

This seems like pretty much the same process. Pick something you've already decided is bad, and reverse engineer your own reality by constructing something with the same name made entirely out of other things you have decided are bad.

Then put your hands over your ears and hum.

Loudly.

[Dahne]

Goro Miyazaki's take on Earthsea ("Gedo Senkei"); no U.S. release until 2010 (!)

Sheesh. You'd think having four arms would make things go quicker.

[Spalanzani]

Dahne:"Sheesh. You'd think having four arms would make things go quicker."

Yeah, but the American distribution for the movie is being handled entirely by Disney, and all they have is Shang Tsung's soul-sucking ability.

[jeh]

Novel needs a Ripley-like character that says something like ""Did I.Q.'s just drop sharply while I was away?"

[Shaenon]

Hell, there's any number of things in Left Behind that require this level of willful disconnect from reality. Like the idea that only born-again evangelical Real True Christians believe in Jesus, and everyone else is a complete heathen. Or that these nonbelievers are not only not Christians, but are completely ignorant about Christianity and the Bible to the point that they're totally gobsmacked if you tell them there's this guy named Jesus. Or that women really love it when you stalk them and boss them around, and if they don't they must be lesbians. Or the way the news media works. Or airport lounges.

Basically, it's nigh-impossible to believe anything that happens in these books without sticking your fingers in your ears and going LA LA LA a whole lot.

[jamoche]

reverse engineer your own reality

That's a fantastic description, right up there with "I reject your reality and substitute my own" :)

[Turcano]

I read these books several years ago, and now I'm wondering how I swallowed any of this... of course, I was eleven at the time, but that's hardly an excuse.

Don't feel bad, everyone held all kinds of stupid ideas when they were eleven, the stupidest being that these ideas are their own.

[Monkay]

How do we know things? Tacit knowledge blah blah . . . epistemology yadda yadda . . . it is found that it is necessary to make certain basic assumptions about the world, the most necessary of which is The Assumption That Life Is Worth Living; which brings me to my point: Someone who truly believes that only the afterlife matters, that this life is Not worth living, cannot know anything.

[Technomad]

I'm still gobsmacked at how Nicky Ozarks managed to take over the UN by reciting its' member nations' names...who is this, anyway, Yakko Warner?

Now there's an idea...the Warner Brothers (and Sister) as the Antichrist! "We will control you by driving you CRAZY! BWAHAHAHAHA!"

Meanwhile, in his secret hideaway nook, Voldemort's kicking himself, saying "And to think I wasted all those years studying magic!"

[Reynard]

"(S)hould I call you Dick? Or Mr. Tator?"

"Just call me Mr. Cheney..."

[Rachel Jayne]

My sister-in-law offered me the first LB book to read a few months. It's sitting on my bookshelf (I agreed simply to get it out of her house and the hands of my brother who considers it "better than non-christian" regardless of the problems). Every week I consider picking it up and having a go at it.

Then Friday comes along and I question why.

I was considering reading it on my day off tomorrow. I will now make more productive plans. Cleaning behind my fridge perhaps.

[Caravelle]

This same kind of deliberate evasion and willing self-deception is what it must take for Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins to be able to persuade themselves of all the strange things they claim to believe about the United Nations.

To LaHaye and Jenkins' credit* I don't think they actually believe all they say about the UN in Left Behind. In this interview LaHaye says the UN was "an easy fall guy" but that they don't actually think it's like they describe it in the book.

Of course they're still guilty of completely implausible plotting/worldbuilding, and they certainly have a lot of misconceptions for it to be that bad.

*Though I don't like this expression here, to me "to X's credit" implies you've something good to say about them. French has an equivalent expression but the implication is opposite, i.e. you're not saying something good, you're just saying X is not quite that bad.
I think the two languages should swap expressions.

[Caravelle]

Drat, link creep.

I'm relistening to that interview to check my above statement, and I just fell on this : "That's the primary purpose of our writing, is to communicate the grace of God and the mercy of God to individuals..."
LOL.
The bit about "real-life characters" at the end of that sentence is funny too...

[Caravelle]

Ok, LaHaye is actually a bit nuttier than I remembered. He actually believes humanity (or at least the sinful, don't-trust-in-God parts of it) yearns for a One World Government, that a majority of people believe it would be the solution to all their problems and the only way to ensure World Peace (which all of humanity also yearns for). To him, this is what has been behind the creation of the UN in the first place.
And of course he believes that a World Government will be set sometime in the future.

So the only thing from his books he doesn't believe is that the UN will become that World Government (he doesn't seem to be sure).

Gah. Even if he doesn't believe the UN is like in the books, he seems to think the portrayal is plausible, which is plenty insane enough for me.

[Raj]

"Left Behind on Tuesday, Aunt Helga? Is it St. Swithun's Day already?"

"'Tis!" replied Aunt Helga.

[PurpleGirl]

FWIW: From the NY Post (May 13, 2007): Next year, the city will become the first school district in the country to recognize cricket as an official varsity sport, giving the world's second-most popular game behind soccer a high-profile foothold in the land of baseball.

Undoubtedly there are real estate forces in NYC which would love the UN to move out of the city. They could transform the buildings and campus into a gated community of high priced condos with lovely river views. But somehow I don't think this is what LaHaye and Jenkins are thinking about.

[Dahne]

Caravelle: Now I'm curious. What's the French expressions?

Also, belated thanks! to Jamoche.

[Rosina]

Purple GirlFWIW: From the NY Post (May 13, 2007): Next year, the city will become the first school district in the country to recognize cricket as an official varsity sport, giving the world's second-most popular game behind soccer a high-profile foothold in the land of baseball.

Undoubtedly there are real estate forces in NYC which would love the UN to move out of the city. They could transform the buildings and campus into a gated community of high priced condos with lovely river views and cricket pitches surrounded by murmuring trees and plates of iced Victoria sponge.

There's a breathless hush in the close tonight...

[Brett]

I remember this as being one of the most singularly preposterous parts of the entire book series, much less this book. LaHaye doesn't even have the excuse of people being so mentally fried in shock at the Event to use as a justification for making this kind of mistake; his people don't seem that mentally abnormal once you subtract LaHaye's +15 VS. Realism.

As for why LaHaye can keep such a preposterous view of the UN, it's actually fairly simple - he just needs to selectively read literature. There's been a rather paranoid vein of American belief over the past 60 years (which reached its height during the 1950s and early 1960s, but continued as a very minoritarian view) that the UN is an "agent of communism" designed to rob the US of its freedom and capitalistic goodness, and turn it over to the Godless Communists. You see a degree of this still lingering around - just think of anyone you've run into on a message board arguing that Global Warming is a fraud perpetuated by a bunch of elites who are secretly trying to cripple America and siphon off its capitalistic goodness.

I liked the quote about Freedman. It's too bad, really; I very much enjoyed "From Beirut to Jerusalem", but if you look at the past 10-20 years, you'll notice an interesting pattern in his reporting. He's more or less turned into a Human Weather Vane - notice how in the 1990s, when globalization was all the rave but tinged with cultural erosion concerns, Friedman wrote a book saying . . . exactly that? Notice how in 2003, he was on the Iraq bandwagon, jumped off when the American people did in 2005-2006, and now is on the Green Energy bandwagon when everyone else is?

[damnedyankee]

I liked the quote about Freedman. It's too bad, really; I very much enjoyed "From Beirut to Jerusalem", but if you look at the past 10-20 years, you'll notice an interesting pattern in his reporting. He's more or less turned into a Human Weather Vane...

"Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others." - Groucho Marx

[Scott]

You're confusing a belief that the UN _is_ a one world govt w/ the fear it will become one. Even if you think the fear is misplaced, it is still a separate issue.

The alleged pacifist demands a global monopoly on the use of force -- what's not to trust?

Hey Jesu, he just said pacifists wanting govt power (which is a "monopoly on force") are untrustworthy hypocrites.

Wanna respond?

I didn't think so.

Ok, LaHaye is actually a bit nuttier than I remembered. He actually believes humanity (or at least the sinful, don't-trust-in-God parts of it) yearns for a One World Government

Don't you? Don't you want 'global' initiatives and supra-national agencies for the environment and other "worthy causes"? Don't you favor ever more centralized government, so we can all have 'unity'? Don't you want global wealth 'redistribution', with those paying unable to leave the program?

This is the fundamental dishonesty of the critique of L&J on the UN. Their paranoid fantasy is your dream, and it's dishonest to talk about the former without admitting the latter.

[bellatrys]

At the local organic grocery/holistic apothecary in town (been there for decades, not a new trendy place at all) I frequently see a car parked there with a bumper sticker on it - the owner is a white-haired guy who looks a bit like Sam the Eagle from the Muppets - which says "UN out of US!" and has a drawing of a skeleton-warrior wearing a UN helmet on it...

[Scott]

what's not to trust?

This is exactly what some of us think when so many of you liberals want the guns held by us mere citizens. Granted, these are weapons held by worthless, pathetic individuals who are fit only to be ruled by you instead of saintly, glorious governments, but you get the picture.

[Jesurgislac]

Although it's been a little while, googling on Scott woe still brings your tale of woe almost to the top of the Googlepage, Scott, so you needn't worry that your woeful tale has been forgotten.

and cricket pitches surrounded by murmuring trees and plates of iced Victoria sponge.
There's a breathless hush in the close tonight...

Rosina: LOL. Great addition to my comment. When I wrote it I wasn't seeing the two parts as connected but your lines do that very well. Thanks.

[PurpleGirl]

Comment @ 07:59 is me, PurpleGirl.

[firefalluk]

Fred, Fred, Fred ... those aren't baseball caps, they're curling caps - and football jerseys? uh-uh, the New York Giants are the World Champion cricket team (Eli Manning has a wicked off-break, and Barber is a -great- Short Cover, or Silly Point).

[car]

Few days late is ok by me - I don't know how you keep doing it week after week without needing a sanity break once a month or so.

[Silly Mid Off]

My name is Maiden Over Montoya. You stumped my father. Prepare to be run out.

[Tonio]

the authors of Left Behind apparently claim to believe that the U.N. is a kind of global federation

Um, I give L&J an extremely tiny benefit of the doubt on this one. They may be simply parroting the John Birch mythology about the U.N. aspiring to one-world government. Perhaps L&J were expecting the organization to achieve that goal by the time of the Rapture, as part of humankind's overall turning away from Real True Christianity.

But Fred's theory about willful stupidity is more fun to talk about.

[patter]

in the deserts of Iraq

Be careful, Nicky. Those Weapons of Mass Destruction left over from the Hussein era could still be there.

[Raj]

"Well, all right. I'll reluctantly be Absolute Dictator of the Planet - but only if you'll all come on a camping holiday with me."

"He asked us! He asked us!"

[Raj]

Car, Fred is able to "keep doing it week after week without needing a sanity break once a month or so" because he's like a sea creature that manages to develop an immunity to the venom of another creature by gradually ingesting the venomous creature's stinging tentacles.