All across the western world, Muslim immigrants have generated a tsunami of complaints about supposed ill treatment the have received here, when in fact the backlash against Islamic terrorism has been practically nonexistant. No one forced these immigrants to come and no one prevents them from returning to the world of Islam, which is geographically quite large.

Yet, the response in many societies has not been the obvious “Buzz Off” but instead a cowering deference (AKA dhimmitude), a fear that convinces our enemies that we are weak and ready to be conquered through immigration and terrorism. It’s a strategy that has worked very well so far — you have to wonder why Hitler bothered to build all those tank battalions and bombers. Demographic warfare is so much cheaper and less messy.

Britain has been one of the worst in terms of appalling weakness in the face of Islam. Theodore Dalrymple reflects on the substitution of normal cultural self-respect with PC debasement:

Here is an interesting little slice of contemporary English life.

The police go to a pub in a small town in Devon, looking for a suspect. They see a man there who they think resembles the suspect, and approach him. He becomes abusive and they arrest him and take him down to the station. He is drunk.

After a couple of hours in a jail cell, he says he feels sick and demands a doctor. The police call the police surgeon. When he arrives (he is an Indian), the arrested man says, “I want an English doctor, not a fucking Paki.”

The police then charge the man with racially aggravated insulting behavior. He elects for a superior court trial, and the prosecution proceeds with the case as though it were a very serious one.
[Sensitivity Lesson, City Journal 1/19/07]

Here in America, a pro-terrorist group, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), masquerades as a civil-rights organization, and the media and government go along with the falsehood. It recently received $50 million over 5 years for a media campaign to “dispel Islamophobia.” That works out to $10 million a year, over $192,000 per week and more than $27,000 per day to be spent on pro-Islam jabbering in the press.

We see the results constantly of all this propaganda money, most recently in CAIR’s whine-fest about the television action series 24, which has had the temerity to show Muslims as terrorists in America:

Hit US television show “24″ came under fire from a Muslim group, which accused the program’s makers of fuelling anti-Muslim prejudice with its latest storyline.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said “24’s” season premiere, in which Islamic terrorists detonated a nuclear bomb near Los Angeles, risked stoking racial hatred.
[Hit US television show '24' under fire from Muslim group, AFP 1/19/07]

One detail omitted by CAIR is that in 2004 Osama expressed his intention to kill 4 million Americans, with nuclear weapons being the means of choice. So one suitcase nuke would be only the beginning in the real terrorist master plan — which is not a fictional television show.

Why is Respectable Opinon so sure that there isn’t the slightest kernel of truth in Afrocentrist rantings about African Sun People and European Ice People? I’m not saying that Dr. Leonard Jeffries knows anything about biochemistry, but I am saying that there seems to be some sort of correlation between gloomy, cold weather and gloomy, cold personalities, just like there is between sunny, warm weather and sunny, warm personalities. And that if the chemical at work is not melanin, it’s worth finding out what it is.

Personally, I don’t know whether being tanned keeps me happy (as “melanin science” would suggest), but getting tanned sure lifts my mood for at least a few hours. What is the biochemical mechanism behind this?

Further, there seems to be a very rough but real relationship between latitude and attitude, with hotter climes correlating with hotter moods. This is a consistent theme through most literature at least since Shakespeare, with his hot-blooded Italians and melancholy Danes.

I read an article about how Tromso, Norway, the farthest Northern small city in the world, has no higher rates of seasonal depression than elsewhere. But, it appears from reading the article that Tromsonites have evolved a culture of self-therapy emphasizing near-mandatory conviviality during winter and bright artificial lights.

Further, self-selection is no doubt going on with people who can’t stand the winters getting out of Tromso and others who don’t mind them migrating in. If there is a genetic component to Seasonal Affective Disorder, this self-selection of darkness-likers will accumulate over the generations.

There’s no doubt a big cultural component in this latitude-attitude correlation. For example, a culture is more likely to develop the charming tradition of shooting guns off in the air to celebrate (e.g., more Baghdadites were killed by falling bullets during peace celebrations at the end of the Iran-Iraq war than were killed by Iranian missile attacks during the eight year war) if it’s not 20 below outside. In places where it’s too cold to go outside, a culture will emphasize developing the kind of self-restraint that keeps you from blasting holes in the ceiling. There is probably also a biological component, but it’s not clear if it’s hereditary or environmental. In other words, when Jimmy Buffett sings that changes in latitude mean changes in attitude is he correct for within an individual, or just across ethnic groups?