Sort of, although I think it begs the question of what is really so elite about egocentrism. It seems to be a recurring problem of human psychology to be seduced by self-confidence, resulting in being overrun by by bullshit artists. I have worked at places where humble attitudes of achievement are mocked in favor of empty grandiloquence apparently as a matter of principle.
I suppose my personal definition of “elite” is more pragmatism than identity. People with inflated egos often seem to be markedly less capable than others.
Yeah, at this point you’d think we’d have enough information to know that people doing hiring need to be trained to see past confidence and place no value on it since deference to confidence is a dangerous blindspot that is so common as to be nearly universal. Instead I get advice like, “If you aren’t confident in an interview, no one will want to hire you.”
With a name like Persis, she was almost certainly Parsi rather than Hindu… not that I am complaining! I crushed on Ilia/Vger hard. My personal head-cannon tells me the the 88 on her neck is only because she is part of the Team Banzai pit crew.
Deltans were originally to have been part of the ultimately scrapped series Star Trek: Phase II. The writers/directors guide for that series stated, “The Deltan race is much older than Humans, with brains much more finely evolved in areas of art and mathematics,” and postulated that all Deltans were “completely hairless except for the eyes.” The guide also suggested that esper abilities were common to the Deltans living on their homeworld and that, in their culture, virtually everything (i.e. all social interaction) was sex-oriented, with sexual foreplay consisting “largely of lovers placing images in each other’s minds.” (Star Trek Phase II: The Lost Series, pp. 90-91)
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The West should seek the further weakening of Islamic State, but not its destruction. A weak but functioning IS can undermine the appeal of the caliphate among radical Muslims; keep bad actors focused on one another rather than on Western targets; and hamper Iran’s quest for regional hegemony.
Ugh, Machiavellian indeed. The idea that having radical killers around is good because they keep other people in check is a pretty shitty idea. It’s funny, I was very ready to accept that we shouldn’t be seeking the destruction of IS, but for fairly different reasons. I mean, imagine that right now you could press a button and everyone who currently identifies with IS would disappear. Leaving aside the fact that the world would be terrified of your magic button, what would happen in the middle east in six months or a year? What would happen to middle-east-backed terrorism in other parts of the world? I don’t think we have a reason to think it would be better or worse. IS didn’t come into being because some number of irreplaceable people of a particular ideology decided to try to take over Iraq and terrorize France.
Getting rid of IS to end violence and terror makes as much sense as IS finding a way to get rid of the current US administration to end the US policy of bombing the middle east. The new guys would just bomb it more.
Part of the charm of the Islamic State is that it’s supposed to be the Caliphate.
The caliphate, Cerantonio told me, is not just a political entity but also a vehicle for salvation. Islamic State propaganda regularly reports the pledges of baya’a (allegiance) rolling in from jihadist groups across the Muslim world. Cerantonio quoted a Prophetic saying, that to die without pledging allegiance is to die jahil (ignorant) and therefore die a “death of disbelief.” Consider how Muslims (or, for that matter, Christians) imagine God deals with the souls of people who die without learning about the one true religion. They are neither obviously saved nor definitively condemned. Similarly, Cerantonio said, the Muslim who acknowledges one omnipotent god and prays, but who dies without pledging himself to a valid caliph and incurring the obligations of that oath, has failed to live a fully Islamic life. I pointed out that this means the vast majority of Muslims in history, and all who passed away between 1924 and 2014, died a death of disbelief. Cerantonio nodded gravely. “I would go so far as to say that Islam has been reestablished” by the caliphate.
A friend of mine had a chapter of her dissertation focused on how some feminist embraced eugenics and actively used racism to argue for their own rights, so it’s not a huge leap, really, to think some modern white supremacists women might embrace feminism, too.
