Edward Cline's Blog, page 18
December 2, 2012
The Sanity of "Islamophobia"
November was
"Islamophobia Awareness" Month. Pat Condell, the indomitable critic
of all things mystical and murky, especially of that paragon of tolerance and
peaceful coexistence, has recommended that the West designate December as
"Hatred and Violence in the Koran"
month.
In a Gatestone
article on the ubiquity of blasphemy laws in Europe, Soeren Kern, in
"Muslims Pressing for Blasphemy Laws in Europe" (November 30th),
cites the continued campaign of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)
to enact stricter laws that would prohibit and punish any speech that "defamed" religion or religious beliefs –
particularly, and most importantly to the OIC, anything Islamic.
The OIC, a bloc of 57 Muslim
countries, is pressuring Western countries into making it an international
crime to criticize Islam or Mohammed – all on [sic] the name of "religious tolerance."
Criticism, of
course, can include all forms of
speech that call into question the foundations, legitimacy, irrationality, or
fraudulency of Islam, from cartoons that mock Mohammad to amateurish videos
("Innocence of Muslims") to scholarly disquisitions. The OIC's disingenuous promotion of
"religious tolerance" makes as much sense as if Stalin and Hitler had
promoted "political tolerance" in the nations they had overrun. "Tolerance"
in this context implies that a tolerable thing is not life- or
value-threatening.
But Islam has
demonstrated repeatedly over fourteen centuries that it is not tolerant of other religions – because those other religions
have threatened its political power. Other religions that compete for men's
minds, time and money are, to Islam, intolerable.
Islam, all the guff about "interfaith dialogue" to the contrary
notwithstanding, is the "one, true" religion. Wherever it has gone,
wherever it has planted settlers or immigrants or fifth columnists, Islam must,
by its totalitarian nature, become supreme and all-encompassing. We see this
happening in Europe. All other beliefs, all other creeds, must defer to it, by
hook, crook, or scimitar. All must
"submit," which is the literal meaning of the term Islam.
Whether or not the
Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic organization that promotes the goal of a global caliphate
(with a little help from President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton), introduced the term Islamophobia to describe any and all criticism of Islam, is moot here (see Robert Spencer's
excellent column on this subject). Anyone branded by Islamic spokesmen or by
the Mainstream Media as Islamophobic
or an Islamophobe, is someone who
genuinely fears Islam and sees it as a threat to his life or his values. This
fear is claimed to emanate from madness or bigotry or racial prejudice. Islam, however, and regardless of the
"race" of its followers, is a system of theocratic totalitarianism.
One can be as "phobic" about it as one would be about Nazism or
Communism, for the same reasons.
There is no reconciliation
or "middle ground" possible between the two intolerants. One or the other must submit. Islam says so. But Western
champions of freedom have yet to say it.
I'm sure that space
limitations governed Kern's catalogue of blasphemy, defamation, and
anti-freedom of speech laws, together with instances of their enforcement on
hapless citizens of various countries.
Aside from the Dutch Parliament's repeal of its blasphemy law, one very
minor recanting of voluntary self-censorship was recently published by the
Associated Press, which has excised the terms "Islamophobia,"
"Homophobia," and "Ethnic Cleansing" from its Style Guide,
and gives one a very slight twinge of hope that the MSM is getting a clue. The
first two terms it claimed (with justification) reflect a mental disorder and
an "irrational fear," and suggest politically incorrect thought, punishable
by law if some action is associated with it.
The
Associated Press has nixed "homophobia," "ethnic
cleansing," and a number of other terms from its Style Book in recent
months.
The online
Style Book now says that "-phobia," "an irrational, uncontrollable
fear, often a form of mental illness" should not be used "in
political or social contexts," including "homophobia" and
"Islamophobia." It also calls "ethnic cleansing" a
"euphemism," and says the AP "does not use 'ethnic cleansing' on
its own. It must be enclosed in quotes, attributed and explained."
"Ethnic
cleansing is a euphemism for pretty violent activities, a phobia is a
psychiatric or medical term for a severe mental disorder. Those terms have been
used quite a bit in the past, and we don't feel that's quite accurate," AP
Deputy Standards Editor Dave Minthorn told POLITICO.
The third term is
actually a legitimate one, for that is precisely what describes a number of
campaigns in remote and recent history. (See the conflicts in Rwanda, Nigeria,
and other African nations; the Armenian Holocaust, initiated by the Turks; and
etc.). The question remains, however, of how to properly define "ethnic
cleansing" or genocide. Does Judaism mean a "race" or a
"religion"? Are those concepts inseparably linked, or not? Does the
term "Islam" denote a race, or a religion? Does Christianity? I do
not think there are enough "cross conversions" of individuals from
one religion to another, by members of numerous "racial" groups, that
would validate the AP's decision to remove "ethnic cleansing" from
its style guide.
After all, if one
is a Semite, one is not necessarily Jewish; one could just as well be a Muslim,
or an atheist, or a Christian, or a Buddhist. "Semites" are men and
so are imbued with the attribute of a volitional consciousness. But Hitler's
concept of Judaism was founded on the faulty premise of determinism: if one is
Jewish, one is necessarily, intrinsically
of a particular "race." Jews can't help being what they are. "Race" is linked to the religion;
it is in a Jew's genes (or his "blood") to be "Jewish" and
adhere to a particular creed. Appended
to this horrendous fallacy was the Nazi assertion that to be Jewish is also to
be a corrupting and destructive influence and the bane of all moral men.
The obverse of this
policy was that Aryans were intrinsically "superior" physically and
mentally but polluted with the "blood" of inferior races. This was
just as much a myth as Hitler's Jewish race one, because all during the
abbreviated "Thousand Year Reich," it glossed over the historic fact
that what is now modern Germany was a kind of Grand Central Station for several
thousand years as waves of other races passed through it on tides of conquest
and immigration from the four corners of Europe and even from Asia in the form
of the Mongols and Huns.
This was Hitler's
own irrational "phobia"; it justified in his own mind a campaign of
"ethnic cleansing," which was the Holocaust. But even there, Hitler
wasn’t consistent. He sent to extermination camps Jews of various
nationalities, from Germany, Poland, France, Norway, and so on. Which was the
deciding factor in those expulsions to the death camps: the victims'
nationality, their religion, or their race? So, the argument could be made that
"ethnic cleansing" is not necessarily synonymous with
"religious" or "ideological" or even "racial" cleansing,
but that equivocation seems to be the rule of thumb today. Why should we or the
AP accept Hitler's or Islam's (or Hamas's) murky, undefined notion of "ethnic
cleansing" or "genocide"? The concept's definition needs to be
refined.
The
Oxford English Dictionary
has this definition of definition:
No.
6. To state exactly what (a thing) is;
to set forth or explain the essential nature of.
No.
6b. To set forth or explain what (a word
or expression) means; to declare the signification of.
From the Ayn Rand Lexicon:
A definition is a statement that identifies the nature of the units
subsumed under a concept.
With the concept table, for example, the nature of a
table is that it is flat, utilitarian furniture with legs and all entities that
meet those criteria are identified as tables.
It does not specify carved legs or inlaid marble surfaces or how many
corners it has, only a table's essential attributes.
To return to the term
"phobia" and its recent and indiscriminate employment as a suffix, is
there a legitimate reason one may append the term to nouns? Is there such a
thing as a "rational" phobia? As a metaphor, yes. But, first, let's examine the term phob or phobe, which is the Greek for "fear." The O.E.D. defines phobia:
Fear, horror, or aversion,
especially of a morbid character.
Note the qualifier,
morbid, which implies an unreasoning,
irrational, or baseless character. The term may be used in the way of an
analogy, such as "Anglophobe" or "Russophobe" to describe a
person who causelessly fears Britons or Russians. These, too, and their many
variants, are legitimate, definable terms. The question is: Are these
"phobias" necessarily "morbid," or irrational? Should the term
"phobia" be used exclusively in a clinical context, or is it
legitimate to append it to any term one wishes?
It all depends on
the context of its usage. All knowledge is contextual. If one has ophiophobia,
does it include a fear of or revulsion for all snakes, including harmless
Garter snakes, or just venomous snakes, such as cobras and rattlesnakes? If it includes all snakes, then one might say
the phobia is a candidate for diagnosis. If it excludes all snakes but the
venomous ones, then that is a saner phobia, whether or not one is trained in
how to deal safely with them.
Is it sane to be
"Islamophobic"? Resoundingly, yes, and most especially if one has at
least a passing knowledge of Islam's nature and its history of murder, slavery,
plunder, and empire building. It means that one is fearful of Islam in and of
itself, and also contemptuous of Westerners in and out of government whose policies
aim to "reconcile" the irreconcilable systems of Islam and freedom.
Is it sane to have
Obamaphobia? Without a doubt. Obama has proven to be as much as nemesis to life,
liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness as Islam or any other totalitarian
ideology.
"Islamophobia Awareness" Month. Pat Condell, the indomitable critic
of all things mystical and murky, especially of that paragon of tolerance and
peaceful coexistence, has recommended that the West designate December as
"Hatred and Violence in the Koran"
month.
In a Gatestone
article on the ubiquity of blasphemy laws in Europe, Soeren Kern, in
"Muslims Pressing for Blasphemy Laws in Europe" (November 30th),
cites the continued campaign of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)
to enact stricter laws that would prohibit and punish any speech that "defamed" religion or religious beliefs –
particularly, and most importantly to the OIC, anything Islamic.
The OIC, a bloc of 57 Muslim
countries, is pressuring Western countries into making it an international
crime to criticize Islam or Mohammed – all on [sic] the name of "religious tolerance."
Criticism, of
course, can include all forms of
speech that call into question the foundations, legitimacy, irrationality, or
fraudulency of Islam, from cartoons that mock Mohammad to amateurish videos
("Innocence of Muslims") to scholarly disquisitions. The OIC's disingenuous promotion of
"religious tolerance" makes as much sense as if Stalin and Hitler had
promoted "political tolerance" in the nations they had overrun. "Tolerance"
in this context implies that a tolerable thing is not life- or
value-threatening.
But Islam has
demonstrated repeatedly over fourteen centuries that it is not tolerant of other religions – because those other religions
have threatened its political power. Other religions that compete for men's
minds, time and money are, to Islam, intolerable.
Islam, all the guff about "interfaith dialogue" to the contrary
notwithstanding, is the "one, true" religion. Wherever it has gone,
wherever it has planted settlers or immigrants or fifth columnists, Islam must,
by its totalitarian nature, become supreme and all-encompassing. We see this
happening in Europe. All other beliefs, all other creeds, must defer to it, by
hook, crook, or scimitar. All must
"submit," which is the literal meaning of the term Islam.
Whether or not the
Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic organization that promotes the goal of a global caliphate
(with a little help from President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton), introduced the term Islamophobia to describe any and all criticism of Islam, is moot here (see Robert Spencer's
excellent column on this subject). Anyone branded by Islamic spokesmen or by
the Mainstream Media as Islamophobic
or an Islamophobe, is someone who
genuinely fears Islam and sees it as a threat to his life or his values. This
fear is claimed to emanate from madness or bigotry or racial prejudice. Islam, however, and regardless of the
"race" of its followers, is a system of theocratic totalitarianism.
One can be as "phobic" about it as one would be about Nazism or
Communism, for the same reasons.
There is no reconciliation
or "middle ground" possible between the two intolerants. One or the other must submit. Islam says so. But Western
champions of freedom have yet to say it.
I'm sure that space
limitations governed Kern's catalogue of blasphemy, defamation, and
anti-freedom of speech laws, together with instances of their enforcement on
hapless citizens of various countries.
Aside from the Dutch Parliament's repeal of its blasphemy law, one very
minor recanting of voluntary self-censorship was recently published by the
Associated Press, which has excised the terms "Islamophobia,"
"Homophobia," and "Ethnic Cleansing" from its Style Guide,
and gives one a very slight twinge of hope that the MSM is getting a clue. The
first two terms it claimed (with justification) reflect a mental disorder and
an "irrational fear," and suggest politically incorrect thought, punishable
by law if some action is associated with it.
The
Associated Press has nixed "homophobia," "ethnic
cleansing," and a number of other terms from its Style Book in recent
months.
The online
Style Book now says that "-phobia," "an irrational, uncontrollable
fear, often a form of mental illness" should not be used "in
political or social contexts," including "homophobia" and
"Islamophobia." It also calls "ethnic cleansing" a
"euphemism," and says the AP "does not use 'ethnic cleansing' on
its own. It must be enclosed in quotes, attributed and explained."
"Ethnic
cleansing is a euphemism for pretty violent activities, a phobia is a
psychiatric or medical term for a severe mental disorder. Those terms have been
used quite a bit in the past, and we don't feel that's quite accurate," AP
Deputy Standards Editor Dave Minthorn told POLITICO.
The third term is
actually a legitimate one, for that is precisely what describes a number of
campaigns in remote and recent history. (See the conflicts in Rwanda, Nigeria,
and other African nations; the Armenian Holocaust, initiated by the Turks; and
etc.). The question remains, however, of how to properly define "ethnic
cleansing" or genocide. Does Judaism mean a "race" or a
"religion"? Are those concepts inseparably linked, or not? Does the
term "Islam" denote a race, or a religion? Does Christianity? I do
not think there are enough "cross conversions" of individuals from
one religion to another, by members of numerous "racial" groups, that
would validate the AP's decision to remove "ethnic cleansing" from
its style guide.
After all, if one
is a Semite, one is not necessarily Jewish; one could just as well be a Muslim,
or an atheist, or a Christian, or a Buddhist. "Semites" are men and
so are imbued with the attribute of a volitional consciousness. But Hitler's
concept of Judaism was founded on the faulty premise of determinism: if one is
Jewish, one is necessarily, intrinsically
of a particular "race." Jews can't help being what they are. "Race" is linked to the religion;
it is in a Jew's genes (or his "blood") to be "Jewish" and
adhere to a particular creed. Appended
to this horrendous fallacy was the Nazi assertion that to be Jewish is also to
be a corrupting and destructive influence and the bane of all moral men.
The obverse of this
policy was that Aryans were intrinsically "superior" physically and
mentally but polluted with the "blood" of inferior races. This was
just as much a myth as Hitler's Jewish race one, because all during the
abbreviated "Thousand Year Reich," it glossed over the historic fact
that what is now modern Germany was a kind of Grand Central Station for several
thousand years as waves of other races passed through it on tides of conquest
and immigration from the four corners of Europe and even from Asia in the form
of the Mongols and Huns.
This was Hitler's
own irrational "phobia"; it justified in his own mind a campaign of
"ethnic cleansing," which was the Holocaust. But even there, Hitler
wasn’t consistent. He sent to extermination camps Jews of various
nationalities, from Germany, Poland, France, Norway, and so on. Which was the
deciding factor in those expulsions to the death camps: the victims'
nationality, their religion, or their race? So, the argument could be made that
"ethnic cleansing" is not necessarily synonymous with
"religious" or "ideological" or even "racial" cleansing,
but that equivocation seems to be the rule of thumb today. Why should we or the
AP accept Hitler's or Islam's (or Hamas's) murky, undefined notion of "ethnic
cleansing" or "genocide"? The concept's definition needs to be
refined.
The
Oxford English Dictionary
has this definition of definition:
No.
6. To state exactly what (a thing) is;
to set forth or explain the essential nature of.
No.
6b. To set forth or explain what (a word
or expression) means; to declare the signification of.
From the Ayn Rand Lexicon:
A definition is a statement that identifies the nature of the units
subsumed under a concept.
With the concept table, for example, the nature of a
table is that it is flat, utilitarian furniture with legs and all entities that
meet those criteria are identified as tables.
It does not specify carved legs or inlaid marble surfaces or how many
corners it has, only a table's essential attributes.
To return to the term
"phobia" and its recent and indiscriminate employment as a suffix, is
there a legitimate reason one may append the term to nouns? Is there such a
thing as a "rational" phobia? As a metaphor, yes. But, first, let's examine the term phob or phobe, which is the Greek for "fear." The O.E.D. defines phobia:
Fear, horror, or aversion,
especially of a morbid character.
Note the qualifier,
morbid, which implies an unreasoning,
irrational, or baseless character. The term may be used in the way of an
analogy, such as "Anglophobe" or "Russophobe" to describe a
person who causelessly fears Britons or Russians. These, too, and their many
variants, are legitimate, definable terms. The question is: Are these
"phobias" necessarily "morbid," or irrational? Should the term
"phobia" be used exclusively in a clinical context, or is it
legitimate to append it to any term one wishes?
It all depends on
the context of its usage. All knowledge is contextual. If one has ophiophobia,
does it include a fear of or revulsion for all snakes, including harmless
Garter snakes, or just venomous snakes, such as cobras and rattlesnakes? If it includes all snakes, then one might say
the phobia is a candidate for diagnosis. If it excludes all snakes but the
venomous ones, then that is a saner phobia, whether or not one is trained in
how to deal safely with them.
Is it sane to be
"Islamophobic"? Resoundingly, yes, and most especially if one has at
least a passing knowledge of Islam's nature and its history of murder, slavery,
plunder, and empire building. It means that one is fearful of Islam in and of
itself, and also contemptuous of Westerners in and out of government whose policies
aim to "reconcile" the irreconcilable systems of Islam and freedom.
Is it sane to have
Obamaphobia? Without a doubt. Obama has proven to be as much as nemesis to life,
liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness as Islam or any other totalitarian
ideology.
November 29, 2012
The Nihilism of the New Relativity
Why do Western politicians and the Mainstream Media hale and defend Islam? Why do they promote the welfare state? Why do literary critics lionize salacious and third-rate novelists? Why do art critics exhaust Roget's Thesaurus in their praise of anti-art? Why do politicians and journalists side with the global warming advocates, and then, when global warming has been repudiated, side with "climate change" advocates who promote the same fraud? What makes these paradoxes so common in our culture?
There are several explanations, none of them pretty or complimentary. There are three main culprits: subjectivism, egalitarianism, and relativism.
Let us begin with relativism. Without critiquing Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, that theory somehow infected the realm of thinking in the West. It was attractive to those who were critical of the West and its economic, technological, and scientific achievements. They were drawn to it like moths to a light bulb. Einstein's theory is an attempt to explain the relationship between gravity and entities with mass and the speed of light. However, there is something alluring about the term "relative" to cultural relativists, multiculturalists, ethical relativists, moral relativists, artistic relativists, and every other kind of relativist. It allows them to discard the Newtonian concepts of time, space, and gravity, to discard the concepts of sensory perception, objective reality, and reality itself. And especially of the volitional nature of man's mind. It allows them to dispense with absolutes, certainty, values and value measurement.
Relativism is the cowardly form of nihilism, whose end is to destroy man's cognition and his capacity to hold values by elevating the mediocre, the nondescript, and the irrational.
As Ellsworth Toohey, the arch villain of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, articulated the principal method:
It is for the sake of the mediocre, the nondescript, and the average that the relativists have waged a constant and enervating war.
Subjectivism is the position that no opinion, statement, or observation is more valid (or truer) than another's. Truth, therefore, is "subjective," dependent on an individual's unique "perspective." Truth cannot be known for a certainty. An individual's perspective is governed and molded by his cultural "conditioning," or by his genes, or by his "class," or by his tribe or voting bloc. His "truth" is different from another individual's. His mind is but a passive receptor of things around him; he exercises no volition to judge and evaluate things. He is a reactor, not an actor.
Subjectivism is closely linked to egalitarianism, which asserts that, as with political equality, all values are of equal status and importance. All values are alike, and all distinguishing marks or measures applied to them are not only irrelevant, but even immoral, for they infer one value's superiority over another.
American lives and American treasure must be sacrificed to preserve the stagnant, filthy, mysticism-ruled cultures of Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Egypt, because they have every "right" to exist as does America.
Palestinians have every right to hate Israel, because Israel is what they are not .
When you examine the relativists' arguments, you will see that truth has nothing to do with their concern for truth. Truth is thrown out the window in favor of some unprovable Platonic "form" because, their philosophical mentors have said, the things one sees are but rough, indistinct sketches of those things which exist in their "perfect" forms in another realm not discernible to our senses or which confounds them. Or, as an alternative, they are Kantian defined entities that have no relation to themselves or even to any other-worldly "forms," because, the Kantians say, our senses so totally warp our perception of things "as they really are" that what we see is nothing at all. According to Kant, our minds are pre-programmed and biased to process sensory data and to assign absurd and completely arbitrary labels to everything we see, hear, touch, or know, because we have this sinful urge to pretend we know things.
Any way we look at it, say the Platonists and the Kantians and their numerous academic and journalistic protégés, it's sheer, hubristic sophistry, and men ought to be mature enough to concede that they're nothing but miserable, shapeless forms of random matter with delusions of grandeur.
Consensus plays a role in this brand of relativism. The more people who believe in a certain, opinion, statement, or observation, the "truer" it must be, because so many people agree with it (or disagree with it, so it must be "not true"). This is the popular understanding of "truth." It raises the concept of "number" to the status of a golden calf or an extrasensory oracle in a trance to be worshipped and heeded and deferred to. Thus, "truth" is determined democratically, by majority rule, because numbers are imbued with some magical efficacy to make things true. Reality, it would appear, is susceptible to stuffed ballot boxes and governed by numerology wedded to astrology.
Reality says that the South Side Chicago criminal gang took care of the North Side gang by inviting them to a peace conference and to a share of the Detroit Purple Gang's stolen whiskey, but instead lined them up against a wall and machine-gunned them. The liberal/left multiculturalist fantasy world premise says it's Hamas showering Israel (now cast by Islamists and the Left as a gang) with harmless Fourth of July fireworks, then inviting Israel to a cease-fire and peace talks and a plate of halal cookies fresh from the U.S. and Egypt, and then shooting Iranian-made paint balls at the Israelis, swearing on a stack of Korans that Hamas means no harm.
The doyens of diversity claim that the political aspirations of terrorists, whose means of persuasion include murder and mayhem and destruction, are no less legitimate than those of Israelis, who live in relative freedom and are a productive nation, whom they also charge with murder, mayhem, and destruction. Western pragmatists (another species of relativist) state that Israelis have nothing to fear by being encircled by a Palestinian state and other Muslim states, or even living in a "One State" with millions of Muslim Rodney Kings who just "want to get along."
Reality says that any works by Jean-Léon Gerome, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Daniel Chester French, or virtually any notable 19th century painter or sculptor (except Rodin, who was a kind of bridge between representational art and the abstract) is superior to anything produced in the 20th century by Warhol, Pollack, Picasso, Giacometti, etc. Relativist esthetic criticism says that no work of art is superior to another, because everyone sees things differently, it's all relative to one's culture or genes or class. Rodin's or Giacometti's "Walking Man" is just as good as Michelangelo's "David" or Frédéric Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty.
But relativists do not completely eschew measurement of values in any realm. For example, they would gain nothing by comparing a Kewpie Doll to a Hummel figurine, and claiming that they are of equal esthetic value (which, in fact, they are). What they need is a standard to muddy, sully, and obliterate, and would proceed to assert an esthetic equivalence between a Kewpie Doll and a statue of Leonidas, hero of Thermopylae. This is nihilism in action. Leonidas perishes; the Kewpie Doll survives.
Beauty, they say, is in the eyes of the beholder. But if the beholder doesn’t agree that something is beautiful, in modern culture he is free to spray paint it or take a hammer to it or cover it with a linguistic burqa lest it offend the subjective proclivities of other beholders.
Reality says that you are being of volitional consciousness who can think and make value judgments about what will advance your life and act to secure your happiness as a rational individual. The liberal/left fantasy view says that you are but a cog or a cipher of your class, race, tribe, gender, or group or social environment, a puppet of determinism helpless to be anything but what you are and to do whatever it is you do. Reason and rationality are simply "perspectives" no better or no more valid than psychosis or channeling the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt or believing in witches or Hobbits or Muslim warlords who rode to heaven on white steeds to confer with Allah and the angels.
Reality is taking advantage of the First Amendment and saying anything one likes, as crudely or as elegantly as one wishes, without inviting legitimate charges of slander or libel, and accepting the rewards or the flack for having done so. Fantasy World First Amendment rights, however, must be policed to protect and preserve the feelings, dignity, self-esteem, and image of anyone who is slighted by the least amount of genuine or deserved criticism, particularly groups with political claims to victimhood and discrimination.
Thus, if one demonstrates that Islam and Muslims are out to conquer the world and establish a global caliphate, that proof is not protected by the First Amendment, and one can be harassed, shunned, marginalized, censored, sued or jailed. Muslims who noisily demonstrate in public streets and carry signs that say "Islam Will Dominate the World," and "Freedom of Speech Go to Hell," or establish a Facebook page dedicated to discussing how best to roast Jews and apostates, are protected, and are rewarded with continued welfare benefits and special accommodations and the sympathy of a press silenced its own unacknowledged brand of "Islamophobia."
The best method of bursting any relativist balloon discussed in this column is to inform the relativist: You are making an absolute statement. Isn't that against the rules? Aren’t you violating your own maxim? How can you be certain that what you're saying about relativism is true?
But few people realize how easy it is to correct the subjectivist, multiculturalist, or egalitarian. The sharp relativist will reply: How do you know it isn't true? It's then that you'll realize that the relativist is playing mind games with you, and that his chief end is to make you doubt the evidence of your senses, question the efficacy of your reason, and help him negate the supremacy of your values.
It's then that dialogue should end with the relativist, and it will be up to you to terminate it. Unless you are addicted to the sophistry of an intellectual Möbius strip.
There are several explanations, none of them pretty or complimentary. There are three main culprits: subjectivism, egalitarianism, and relativism.
Let us begin with relativism. Without critiquing Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, that theory somehow infected the realm of thinking in the West. It was attractive to those who were critical of the West and its economic, technological, and scientific achievements. They were drawn to it like moths to a light bulb. Einstein's theory is an attempt to explain the relationship between gravity and entities with mass and the speed of light. However, there is something alluring about the term "relative" to cultural relativists, multiculturalists, ethical relativists, moral relativists, artistic relativists, and every other kind of relativist. It allows them to discard the Newtonian concepts of time, space, and gravity, to discard the concepts of sensory perception, objective reality, and reality itself. And especially of the volitional nature of man's mind. It allows them to dispense with absolutes, certainty, values and value measurement.
Relativism is the cowardly form of nihilism, whose end is to destroy man's cognition and his capacity to hold values by elevating the mediocre, the nondescript, and the irrational.
As Ellsworth Toohey, the arch villain of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, articulated the principal method:
"Don't set out to raze all shrines — you'll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity — and the shrines are razed."
It is for the sake of the mediocre, the nondescript, and the average that the relativists have waged a constant and enervating war.
Subjectivism is the position that no opinion, statement, or observation is more valid (or truer) than another's. Truth, therefore, is "subjective," dependent on an individual's unique "perspective." Truth cannot be known for a certainty. An individual's perspective is governed and molded by his cultural "conditioning," or by his genes, or by his "class," or by his tribe or voting bloc. His "truth" is different from another individual's. His mind is but a passive receptor of things around him; he exercises no volition to judge and evaluate things. He is a reactor, not an actor.
Subjectivism is closely linked to egalitarianism, which asserts that, as with political equality, all values are of equal status and importance. All values are alike, and all distinguishing marks or measures applied to them are not only irrelevant, but even immoral, for they infer one value's superiority over another.
American lives and American treasure must be sacrificed to preserve the stagnant, filthy, mysticism-ruled cultures of Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Egypt, because they have every "right" to exist as does America.
Palestinians have every right to hate Israel, because Israel is what they are not .
When you examine the relativists' arguments, you will see that truth has nothing to do with their concern for truth. Truth is thrown out the window in favor of some unprovable Platonic "form" because, their philosophical mentors have said, the things one sees are but rough, indistinct sketches of those things which exist in their "perfect" forms in another realm not discernible to our senses or which confounds them. Or, as an alternative, they are Kantian defined entities that have no relation to themselves or even to any other-worldly "forms," because, the Kantians say, our senses so totally warp our perception of things "as they really are" that what we see is nothing at all. According to Kant, our minds are pre-programmed and biased to process sensory data and to assign absurd and completely arbitrary labels to everything we see, hear, touch, or know, because we have this sinful urge to pretend we know things.
Any way we look at it, say the Platonists and the Kantians and their numerous academic and journalistic protégés, it's sheer, hubristic sophistry, and men ought to be mature enough to concede that they're nothing but miserable, shapeless forms of random matter with delusions of grandeur.
Consensus plays a role in this brand of relativism. The more people who believe in a certain, opinion, statement, or observation, the "truer" it must be, because so many people agree with it (or disagree with it, so it must be "not true"). This is the popular understanding of "truth." It raises the concept of "number" to the status of a golden calf or an extrasensory oracle in a trance to be worshipped and heeded and deferred to. Thus, "truth" is determined democratically, by majority rule, because numbers are imbued with some magical efficacy to make things true. Reality, it would appear, is susceptible to stuffed ballot boxes and governed by numerology wedded to astrology.
Reality says that the South Side Chicago criminal gang took care of the North Side gang by inviting them to a peace conference and to a share of the Detroit Purple Gang's stolen whiskey, but instead lined them up against a wall and machine-gunned them. The liberal/left multiculturalist fantasy world premise says it's Hamas showering Israel (now cast by Islamists and the Left as a gang) with harmless Fourth of July fireworks, then inviting Israel to a cease-fire and peace talks and a plate of halal cookies fresh from the U.S. and Egypt, and then shooting Iranian-made paint balls at the Israelis, swearing on a stack of Korans that Hamas means no harm.
The doyens of diversity claim that the political aspirations of terrorists, whose means of persuasion include murder and mayhem and destruction, are no less legitimate than those of Israelis, who live in relative freedom and are a productive nation, whom they also charge with murder, mayhem, and destruction. Western pragmatists (another species of relativist) state that Israelis have nothing to fear by being encircled by a Palestinian state and other Muslim states, or even living in a "One State" with millions of Muslim Rodney Kings who just "want to get along."
Reality says that any works by Jean-Léon Gerome, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Daniel Chester French, or virtually any notable 19th century painter or sculptor (except Rodin, who was a kind of bridge between representational art and the abstract) is superior to anything produced in the 20th century by Warhol, Pollack, Picasso, Giacometti, etc. Relativist esthetic criticism says that no work of art is superior to another, because everyone sees things differently, it's all relative to one's culture or genes or class. Rodin's or Giacometti's "Walking Man" is just as good as Michelangelo's "David" or Frédéric Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty.
But relativists do not completely eschew measurement of values in any realm. For example, they would gain nothing by comparing a Kewpie Doll to a Hummel figurine, and claiming that they are of equal esthetic value (which, in fact, they are). What they need is a standard to muddy, sully, and obliterate, and would proceed to assert an esthetic equivalence between a Kewpie Doll and a statue of Leonidas, hero of Thermopylae. This is nihilism in action. Leonidas perishes; the Kewpie Doll survives.
Beauty, they say, is in the eyes of the beholder. But if the beholder doesn’t agree that something is beautiful, in modern culture he is free to spray paint it or take a hammer to it or cover it with a linguistic burqa lest it offend the subjective proclivities of other beholders.
Reality says that you are being of volitional consciousness who can think and make value judgments about what will advance your life and act to secure your happiness as a rational individual. The liberal/left fantasy view says that you are but a cog or a cipher of your class, race, tribe, gender, or group or social environment, a puppet of determinism helpless to be anything but what you are and to do whatever it is you do. Reason and rationality are simply "perspectives" no better or no more valid than psychosis or channeling the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt or believing in witches or Hobbits or Muslim warlords who rode to heaven on white steeds to confer with Allah and the angels.
Reality is taking advantage of the First Amendment and saying anything one likes, as crudely or as elegantly as one wishes, without inviting legitimate charges of slander or libel, and accepting the rewards or the flack for having done so. Fantasy World First Amendment rights, however, must be policed to protect and preserve the feelings, dignity, self-esteem, and image of anyone who is slighted by the least amount of genuine or deserved criticism, particularly groups with political claims to victimhood and discrimination.
Thus, if one demonstrates that Islam and Muslims are out to conquer the world and establish a global caliphate, that proof is not protected by the First Amendment, and one can be harassed, shunned, marginalized, censored, sued or jailed. Muslims who noisily demonstrate in public streets and carry signs that say "Islam Will Dominate the World," and "Freedom of Speech Go to Hell," or establish a Facebook page dedicated to discussing how best to roast Jews and apostates, are protected, and are rewarded with continued welfare benefits and special accommodations and the sympathy of a press silenced its own unacknowledged brand of "Islamophobia."
The best method of bursting any relativist balloon discussed in this column is to inform the relativist: You are making an absolute statement. Isn't that against the rules? Aren’t you violating your own maxim? How can you be certain that what you're saying about relativism is true?
But few people realize how easy it is to correct the subjectivist, multiculturalist, or egalitarian. The sharp relativist will reply: How do you know it isn't true? It's then that you'll realize that the relativist is playing mind games with you, and that his chief end is to make you doubt the evidence of your senses, question the efficacy of your reason, and help him negate the supremacy of your values.
It's then that dialogue should end with the relativist, and it will be up to you to terminate it. Unless you are addicted to the sophistry of an intellectual Möbius strip.
November 27, 2012
A Carnival of the Left
Once the world has
been made right forever and ever, and all capitalists,
"right-wingers," "conservatives," Objectivists,
Constitution obsessers, Jews, the ideologically unfaithful, gun-lovers,
Bible-huggers, libertarians, separationists, and First and Second Amendment
cultists – in short, all the philosophically crippled (or "differently
abled") have been vanquished and buried in ecologically-friendly mass
graves in a potter's field, the inheritors of the earth will be able to
celebrate their triumph at the Greatest Carnival There Ever Was or Ever Will
Be.*
After the
Transportation Security Agency (affiliated now with the Benevolent Brotherhood
of Government Employees) has patted you down, groped you, x-rayed you, scanned your
brain, and given you a clean bill of ideological health by the resident proctologist,
and after your palm has been implanted (painlessly) with a microchip that will
track your comings and goings on the Midway (as part of a customer satisfaction
survey program), your clothes, purses, and carry-in tote bags will be returned
to you after being screened for unauthorized items. You will then be admitted
past the booby-trapped security booth to enjoy the many wonders of the New
World Carnival.
(WARNING: All
non-approved items found on the persons or in the clothing or otherwise in the
possession of Carnival-goers, such as tobacco products, chewing gum, caffeine-related
stimulants, brand-name medications, liquors of any kind, recording devices,
vitamin supplements, nail clippers, plastic water bottles, hairspray,
unapproved inflammatory literature, appetite suppressants, family photographs
of questionable taste, mints, breath-savers, and etc., will be permanently
confiscated by the TSA, and the names of their owners reported to Central
Citizen Control [the CDC] for further monitoring and evaluation. See the recently
revised Index of Prohibited Articles for a complete list of banned items.)
(ADVISORY:
Cyclists' helmets are provided at no cost to all Carnival-goers (unless you
bring your own), and MUST BE WORN on the fairgrounds AT ALL TIMES. This is for
your protection and that of your fellow citizens. Removal of a helmet for ANY
reason will result in your eviction from the Carnival and a stiff penalty, and
your name sent to the CDC. Muslims are exempted from this rule.)
What will first
seduce your senses are the aromas emanating from the many food concession stands
that line the Midway. At each one you will be able to choose from and feast on
the latest culinary innovations by a host of government licensed nutritionists
and chefs: scrumptious granola bars, chocolate-flavored weight-fighting wafers
and griddle cakes, meatless burgers of all kinds (pork and bacon have been
prohibited to accommodate our Muslim brethren), halal chicken kabobs, salad soufflés, soy-based cotton candy, diet
juice drinks galore (sorry, no super-sized portions available per the Bloomberg
regulation), raw popcorn, salt- and butter-free corn on the cob, imitation beef
jerky – and many hard-to-resist selections of the heartiest food ever contrived
for a healthy and wise citizenry. And all sugar- and transfat-free, too!
Bang! Ping! Bang! Ping!
What's that familiar sound, you ask? Why, that's the Enemies Eliminated
Shooting Gallery where you can take a BB clip's worth of chances to pot the enemies
you love to hate, or a whole row of them! Try your trigger finger at hitting
all twenty ducks-in-a-row: Aristotle, John Locke, Lord Acton, Thomas Jefferson,
Patrick Henry, James Madison, Calvin Coolidge, Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher, Ann
Coulter, Melanie Phillips, Robert Heinlein, Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Winston
Churchill, and so many more haters of mankind. It's hard to believe that
mankind existed for so long when these creatures were at large!
Win a prize! Hit five
out of ten, and win a talking Obama Doll with his own easy-to-assemble teleprompter
kit and pre-recorded examples of his most famous lines! Hit all twenty and win
a half-life-sized Nancy Pelosi Doll (fully dressed, thank God!) and Gavel. Feeling ambitious? Hit all
twenty a second time, and win a companion Harry Reid Doll (fully dressed, thank God!) to go with your Nancy
Pelosi Doll! Think of how impressive they'll look sitting together atop your
fireless fireplace mantle! You'll be the envy of your commune! The Grand Prize
comes with an "I didn't win this" blue ribbon or shirt button.
Looking for thrills
and chills? Try the Tunnel of Horrors, guaranteed to give you a spine-melting,
goose-bumpy, gender-optional shrieking experience! Cringe when Adam Smith's
Invisible Hand reaches down to clutch your head! Shiver when Charlton Heston's
Cold, Dead Hand takes aim at you with his rifle! Grit your teeth as you watch Winston
Churchill shoot poor, helpless jihadists
with his Mauser pistol! Curse when you see the cold, dead expression on James Bond's
face when he shoots an unarmed man (digitally altered), saying, "You've
had your six." Sigh with satisfaction when you see the Muslim-approved
dubbing of "You're the one that I want" number from the banned movie,
Grease, in which a digitally-altered
Olivia Newton-John clad in a burqa invites John Travolta to beat her for
exposing an ankle to a stranger (lyrics altered to be Sharia-compliant, sung
alternately by a Sunni and Shiite muezzin, for balance's sake).
Have a yen to try your luck? Enter the Bingo
Emporium and pick a number! Various kinds of Bingo games available, all with different
rules! No limit on the number of cards one can buy. Unleaded pencils and environmentally-friendly
markers provided free! Win a month's worth of food stamps, or a week's worth of
unadulterated ethanol gasoline (you must provide a driver's license first, to
prevent unauthorized "black market" resale to unregistered drivers –
if you win!), a full set of environmentally-friendly, biodegradable Styrofoam dishware
(not for use in dishwashers, if you still have one!), or a two-month supply of
recycled commode flushing water (not potable, so don't dream of drinking it!). Many
more prizes available.
The Super-Duper Grand
Prize is a perpetual, nontransferable exemption from all Federal, Caliphate, and
United Nations taxes in a signed irrevocable exchange for your right to vote, which
vote may be used at any government authority's discretion. Winner must have
bought fifteen Bingo cards and have won simultaneously on all fifteen to
qualify. All prizes come with a free "I didn't win this" blue ribbon
or shirt button.
Still hungry for
more chills? Enter Dante's Infernal Freak Show and Wax Museum. Who was Dante
Alighieri? The realistically garbed reenactor will explain it to you before
guiding you through a somber gallery of freaks, sociopaths, and malcontents
from the past (but don’t expect to find any mention of him in your history books!). Hold your significant other's hand
tight for reassurance as you confront life-like recreations of Richard Cobden, Thomas
Jefferson, Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, Marva Collins, Clarence Thomas, Friedrich
Hayek, Rita Hayworth, Carole Lombard, Greta Garbo, Sean Connery, Clark Gable, Allen
West, Frédéric Bastiat, Golda Meier, and
so many more haters of mankind. Retch in disgust as "Dante" relates
the sordid details of their lives, following a script approved by the heirs of
Oliver Stone, Herbert Marcuse, and Howard Zinn.
Rides there are aplenty at the Carnival! Take circular
reasoning to new heights in the breath-taking Ferris Wheel! Ride your favorite
enemies on a solar-powered carousel! Exorcize your inner demons in pedal-power
bumper cars! Master the dizzying mental gymnastics of rationalism on the
Whirling Teacups and Tilt-a-Wheels! Be pressed to the wall and experience dialectical
materialism on the Gravity Grinder! Scream your head off on Mohammad's Ride
roller coaster, each car fashioned like a white steed!
Feel like exercising your arm? Try our
"Dunkin' Dhimmis" and throw a Whiffle Ball to see an impersonator of your
favorite enemy fall into boiling hot water. For our Muslim Carnival-goers, there
is a special booth featuring a burqa-clad dummy and real rocks. Duel with a
plastic broad sword or scimitar against your Crusader or Muslim enemy! An extraordinary
range of prizes available to winners. All
prizes come with a free "I didn't win this" blue ribbon or shirt
button.
Growing in popularity at the Carnival is our
special globally televised Wheel of Correctness Game Show, in which attendees
can flaunt their education by guessing the right answers to loaded questions! How
many Jews were left in Palestine after statehood and the Grand Liberation? (Hint:
Fewer than ten.) What are the annual alternate world capitals? (Hint: one is in
Europe, and begins with a "B," and one is in the Mideast, and begins
with a "Q.") Which American was most responsible for nullifying his
outdated, sexist, and anachronistic Constitution? (Hint: there were several.) Where
was the Statue of Liberty located? Where is it now? (We can't offer hints without
giving away the answer!) What is the source of all our wealth and labor-saving
technology? (Hint: Pick a paragraph, any paragraph, from Das Kapital or The General
Theory of Employment, Interest and Money!)
Buy an audience ticket to the show, and enter a
drawing to become a contestant. All prizes won in the contest are of a higher marketable
value than are other Carnival prizes, and will be tax-assessed at 95% of their
posted retail value. All
prizes come with a free "I didn't win this" blue ribbon or shirt
button. Good luck!
So, enjoy the
Carnival before you return to your six-day work week and diet of rice, gruel,
and old shoes. See you next year!
*Carnival (n.) : from
the 1540s, a "time of merrymaking before Lent," from
Fr. Carnaval; from It. carnevale "Shrove Tuesday," from
older It. forms like Milanese *carnelevale, O. Pisan carnelevare
"to remove meat," lit. "raising flesh," from L. caro
"flesh" (see carnage) + levare
"lighten, raise;" folk etymology is from the M.L. carne vale
" 'flesh, farewell.' " Meaning "a circus or fair" is
attested by 1931 in North America.
been made right forever and ever, and all capitalists,
"right-wingers," "conservatives," Objectivists,
Constitution obsessers, Jews, the ideologically unfaithful, gun-lovers,
Bible-huggers, libertarians, separationists, and First and Second Amendment
cultists – in short, all the philosophically crippled (or "differently
abled") have been vanquished and buried in ecologically-friendly mass
graves in a potter's field, the inheritors of the earth will be able to
celebrate their triumph at the Greatest Carnival There Ever Was or Ever Will
Be.*
After the
Transportation Security Agency (affiliated now with the Benevolent Brotherhood
of Government Employees) has patted you down, groped you, x-rayed you, scanned your
brain, and given you a clean bill of ideological health by the resident proctologist,
and after your palm has been implanted (painlessly) with a microchip that will
track your comings and goings on the Midway (as part of a customer satisfaction
survey program), your clothes, purses, and carry-in tote bags will be returned
to you after being screened for unauthorized items. You will then be admitted
past the booby-trapped security booth to enjoy the many wonders of the New
World Carnival.
(WARNING: All
non-approved items found on the persons or in the clothing or otherwise in the
possession of Carnival-goers, such as tobacco products, chewing gum, caffeine-related
stimulants, brand-name medications, liquors of any kind, recording devices,
vitamin supplements, nail clippers, plastic water bottles, hairspray,
unapproved inflammatory literature, appetite suppressants, family photographs
of questionable taste, mints, breath-savers, and etc., will be permanently
confiscated by the TSA, and the names of their owners reported to Central
Citizen Control [the CDC] for further monitoring and evaluation. See the recently
revised Index of Prohibited Articles for a complete list of banned items.)
(ADVISORY:
Cyclists' helmets are provided at no cost to all Carnival-goers (unless you
bring your own), and MUST BE WORN on the fairgrounds AT ALL TIMES. This is for
your protection and that of your fellow citizens. Removal of a helmet for ANY
reason will result in your eviction from the Carnival and a stiff penalty, and
your name sent to the CDC. Muslims are exempted from this rule.)
What will first
seduce your senses are the aromas emanating from the many food concession stands
that line the Midway. At each one you will be able to choose from and feast on
the latest culinary innovations by a host of government licensed nutritionists
and chefs: scrumptious granola bars, chocolate-flavored weight-fighting wafers
and griddle cakes, meatless burgers of all kinds (pork and bacon have been
prohibited to accommodate our Muslim brethren), halal chicken kabobs, salad soufflés, soy-based cotton candy, diet
juice drinks galore (sorry, no super-sized portions available per the Bloomberg
regulation), raw popcorn, salt- and butter-free corn on the cob, imitation beef
jerky – and many hard-to-resist selections of the heartiest food ever contrived
for a healthy and wise citizenry. And all sugar- and transfat-free, too!
Bang! Ping! Bang! Ping!
What's that familiar sound, you ask? Why, that's the Enemies Eliminated
Shooting Gallery where you can take a BB clip's worth of chances to pot the enemies
you love to hate, or a whole row of them! Try your trigger finger at hitting
all twenty ducks-in-a-row: Aristotle, John Locke, Lord Acton, Thomas Jefferson,
Patrick Henry, James Madison, Calvin Coolidge, Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher, Ann
Coulter, Melanie Phillips, Robert Heinlein, Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Winston
Churchill, and so many more haters of mankind. It's hard to believe that
mankind existed for so long when these creatures were at large!
Win a prize! Hit five
out of ten, and win a talking Obama Doll with his own easy-to-assemble teleprompter
kit and pre-recorded examples of his most famous lines! Hit all twenty and win
a half-life-sized Nancy Pelosi Doll (fully dressed, thank God!) and Gavel. Feeling ambitious? Hit all
twenty a second time, and win a companion Harry Reid Doll (fully dressed, thank God!) to go with your Nancy
Pelosi Doll! Think of how impressive they'll look sitting together atop your
fireless fireplace mantle! You'll be the envy of your commune! The Grand Prize
comes with an "I didn't win this" blue ribbon or shirt button.
Looking for thrills
and chills? Try the Tunnel of Horrors, guaranteed to give you a spine-melting,
goose-bumpy, gender-optional shrieking experience! Cringe when Adam Smith's
Invisible Hand reaches down to clutch your head! Shiver when Charlton Heston's
Cold, Dead Hand takes aim at you with his rifle! Grit your teeth as you watch Winston
Churchill shoot poor, helpless jihadists
with his Mauser pistol! Curse when you see the cold, dead expression on James Bond's
face when he shoots an unarmed man (digitally altered), saying, "You've
had your six." Sigh with satisfaction when you see the Muslim-approved
dubbing of "You're the one that I want" number from the banned movie,
Grease, in which a digitally-altered
Olivia Newton-John clad in a burqa invites John Travolta to beat her for
exposing an ankle to a stranger (lyrics altered to be Sharia-compliant, sung
alternately by a Sunni and Shiite muezzin, for balance's sake).
Have a yen to try your luck? Enter the Bingo
Emporium and pick a number! Various kinds of Bingo games available, all with different
rules! No limit on the number of cards one can buy. Unleaded pencils and environmentally-friendly
markers provided free! Win a month's worth of food stamps, or a week's worth of
unadulterated ethanol gasoline (you must provide a driver's license first, to
prevent unauthorized "black market" resale to unregistered drivers –
if you win!), a full set of environmentally-friendly, biodegradable Styrofoam dishware
(not for use in dishwashers, if you still have one!), or a two-month supply of
recycled commode flushing water (not potable, so don't dream of drinking it!). Many
more prizes available.
The Super-Duper Grand
Prize is a perpetual, nontransferable exemption from all Federal, Caliphate, and
United Nations taxes in a signed irrevocable exchange for your right to vote, which
vote may be used at any government authority's discretion. Winner must have
bought fifteen Bingo cards and have won simultaneously on all fifteen to
qualify. All prizes come with a free "I didn't win this" blue ribbon
or shirt button.
Still hungry for
more chills? Enter Dante's Infernal Freak Show and Wax Museum. Who was Dante
Alighieri? The realistically garbed reenactor will explain it to you before
guiding you through a somber gallery of freaks, sociopaths, and malcontents
from the past (but don’t expect to find any mention of him in your history books!). Hold your significant other's hand
tight for reassurance as you confront life-like recreations of Richard Cobden, Thomas
Jefferson, Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, Marva Collins, Clarence Thomas, Friedrich
Hayek, Rita Hayworth, Carole Lombard, Greta Garbo, Sean Connery, Clark Gable, Allen
West, Frédéric Bastiat, Golda Meier, and
so many more haters of mankind. Retch in disgust as "Dante" relates
the sordid details of their lives, following a script approved by the heirs of
Oliver Stone, Herbert Marcuse, and Howard Zinn.
Rides there are aplenty at the Carnival! Take circular
reasoning to new heights in the breath-taking Ferris Wheel! Ride your favorite
enemies on a solar-powered carousel! Exorcize your inner demons in pedal-power
bumper cars! Master the dizzying mental gymnastics of rationalism on the
Whirling Teacups and Tilt-a-Wheels! Be pressed to the wall and experience dialectical
materialism on the Gravity Grinder! Scream your head off on Mohammad's Ride
roller coaster, each car fashioned like a white steed!
Feel like exercising your arm? Try our
"Dunkin' Dhimmis" and throw a Whiffle Ball to see an impersonator of your
favorite enemy fall into boiling hot water. For our Muslim Carnival-goers, there
is a special booth featuring a burqa-clad dummy and real rocks. Duel with a
plastic broad sword or scimitar against your Crusader or Muslim enemy! An extraordinary
range of prizes available to winners. All
prizes come with a free "I didn't win this" blue ribbon or shirt
button.
Growing in popularity at the Carnival is our
special globally televised Wheel of Correctness Game Show, in which attendees
can flaunt their education by guessing the right answers to loaded questions! How
many Jews were left in Palestine after statehood and the Grand Liberation? (Hint:
Fewer than ten.) What are the annual alternate world capitals? (Hint: one is in
Europe, and begins with a "B," and one is in the Mideast, and begins
with a "Q.") Which American was most responsible for nullifying his
outdated, sexist, and anachronistic Constitution? (Hint: there were several.) Where
was the Statue of Liberty located? Where is it now? (We can't offer hints without
giving away the answer!) What is the source of all our wealth and labor-saving
technology? (Hint: Pick a paragraph, any paragraph, from Das Kapital or The General
Theory of Employment, Interest and Money!)
Buy an audience ticket to the show, and enter a
drawing to become a contestant. All prizes won in the contest are of a higher marketable
value than are other Carnival prizes, and will be tax-assessed at 95% of their
posted retail value. All
prizes come with a free "I didn't win this" blue ribbon or shirt
button. Good luck!
So, enjoy the
Carnival before you return to your six-day work week and diet of rice, gruel,
and old shoes. See you next year!
*Carnival (n.) : from
the 1540s, a "time of merrymaking before Lent," from
Fr. Carnaval; from It. carnevale "Shrove Tuesday," from
older It. forms like Milanese *carnelevale, O. Pisan carnelevare
"to remove meat," lit. "raising flesh," from L. caro
"flesh" (see carnage) + levare
"lighten, raise;" folk etymology is from the M.L. carne vale
" 'flesh, farewell.' " Meaning "a circus or fair" is
attested by 1931 in North America.
November 22, 2012
War, Peace, and Wishful Thinking
In one Seinfeld episode, Elaine Benes, the
irrepressibly liberal camp follower, promiscuous skank, and social climber – and
small screen progenitor of Sandra Fluke – remarks with reckless abandon and
shameless gaucheness to a Leo Tolstoy scholar:
“Although one
wonders if War and Peace would have been as highly acclaimed as it
was, had it been published under its original title, War, What Is It Good For ?”
Hillary Clinton,
Secretary of State, is Elaine Benes with arsenic for blood, the air of a
bedraggled, whip-wielding dominatrix, and a weight problem that seems to compete
with her credibility issues. She does not believe in war. She sees no good in
it. War is never "good." Its causes are irrelevant. War means
violence, which may spill over into her own life. War is so scary to her and
her ilk that there is no justification to discriminate between the combatants, between
the good and the bad, between the aggressor and the invaded, between the
civilized and the barbaric and homicidal. If any distinction must be made between
the parties, it should be weighted in favor of the underdog, in this instance,
Hamas, and not Israel.
If Israel didn't
exist, all Mideast problems would be solved. That is the thinking. Or not
thinking. So, because Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, is
"small" and is the aggressor picking on the giant, the world comes
down on the side of the bold and ugly midget.
Hamas, the midget,
can with impunity and global approval hurl rocks and rockets at the giant,
Israel. This is because Hamas knows that the whole world hates Israel because
it is a giant, a stubborn, recalcitrant one that refuses to go away and leave
the midget to his day in the sun over piles of Jewish bodies. So, Hamas and the
Palestinians get a pass. It takes a global village to hate one tiny country
that simply won’t roll over and play dead for the greater good.
Peace could be
secured if Israel would just agree to withdraw to its pre-World War II borders
and stop persecuting its marauding persecutors. Then no one need worry about a
nuclear bomb-armed Iran. Israel is to blame because Iran cannot tolerate its
existence and wants to wipe it out. After all, Iran's beneficent dictator and
font of all wisdom, Mahmud Ahmajinadad, claims the Holocaust never really
happened, and he wishes to correct that fiction by making it a reality. If Israel
were to immolate itself and just let Hamas and Hezbollah and Fatah and hundreds
of thousands of Palestinian zombies have their way with her in ways no one
wishes to imagine, all would be peaceful and just. The Mideast would settle
down and the only troubles one would hear about in that region would be on a
par with the banal disputes of Friends.
One almost expects
President Barack Obama to offer Hamas military air support. To judge by his
behavior, rhetoric and conduct towards Israel since assuming office, the idea
is not too fantastical.
John Rawls, in his
notorious A Theory of Justice , among
other things proposed that the competent, the able, and the superlative, be
hamstrung and penalized so that the incompetent, the disabled, and the mediocre
would have an equal chance at "success." Or at least the latter would
be awarded the appropriate handicap points to accomplish the same thing. This
was deemed a just system to achieve an equalization of results that would
"humanize" competition and preempt the envy, hurt feelings and
frustration of the incompetent, the disabled, and the mediocre. It is the same
"humanitarian" philosophy responsible for such things as soccer games
without scores, overseen by liberal soccer moms concerned about the self-esteem
of their kids and at the same time resentful of the boisterous pride of the
kids on the other team.
Contrary to the
age-old notion and ethics of sportsmanship, the Rawlsian concept of "fair"
is not playing by the rules and winning by the rules. "Fair" is the
tilting of rules in favor of those unable to comprehend the rules or unable to
win by them.
The Rawls notion of
fairness is also partly responsible for the theme here, for stopping Israel
from achieving a victory over Hamas and any of her past assailants and
permanently extinguishing her mortal enemies, thereby achieving some kind of
peace that Hamas would never break because it would no longer exist. That those
mortal enemies are killers who wish to do to Israel what was nearly done to
Lara Logan in Tahir Square – violation in every manner and complete
dismemberment and an agonizing death – is of no import to the humanitarians who
sweat like hogs to broker a deal between Israel and her enemies.
For the sake of
peace, harmony, and international amity, what's one beautiful woman's life
compared with the existence of hundreds of thousands of burqa-encased women
doing their duty to not be beautiful and so not triggering the duty of Muslim men
to assault them? What's the freedom of a single nation compared with the wishes
of hundreds of thousands of manqués who do not yearn to be free but rather wish
to be led, dominated and exploited as all of Allah's wingless chillun?
Hamas and Hezbollah
and Fatah are merely "freedom fighters" in Halloween costumes, ski
masks, and a weakness for Mein Kampf,
and we mustn’t judge them because of their questionable habits and psychopathic
penchant for totalitarianism. Their
feelings are hurt and pent up because the world will not grant them their
handicapped justice, never mind that their concept of the kind of "justice"
they intend for the Israelis is of the Zulu kind when the latter disemboweled
colonial Dutch women and men settlers they happened to have overwhelmed and
killed and paraded their children and infants on the tips of their assegais. Perhaps,
when they returned to their kraals, they also passed out candy in celebration
of their victory.
Lest someone
suggest that is a "racist" comparison, I could also cite Vlad the
Impaler and what he did to invading Turks, or the Turks and Kurds who savaged
the Armenians, or the Apaches and the Iroquois whose methods of torturing and
killing whites and other Indians rivaled in cruelty those of the Nazis. And, of
course, Islam's sacred documents describe and report numerous methods of
killing and torturing Jews, infidels, apostates, and others who do not submit
to all of Allah's and Mohammad's dictats.
Daniel Greenfield,
in his Sultan Knish column, "War is the Answer," about the alleged "cease-fire"
coerced on Israel by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, mentioned the ethereal
character of Immanuel Kant's plan for "perpetual peace." Kant is one
of Rawls's intellectual ancestors. It should be pointed out, however, that our
humanitarian diplomats are also motivated by one of the Prussian philosopher's
categorical imperatives, to do that which one "feels" is right and to
act to make it an ineluctable maxim, to "will" it as a moral law and
duty, regardless of the cost to oneself or to others, even if it means engaging
in a bit of nihilistic destruction.
Kant's notion of
"peace" is also responsible for the "peace" promulgated by
yesteryear's hippies and peaceniks, a "peace" without morality or
conditions, "peace" for the sake of "peace," regardless of
the cost to those who would lose their lives from its enforcement. And
yesteryear's hippies became Rhodes scholars and attained permanent places in
political leadership, academic, diplomatic, military, and policymaking circles.
Need I mention names?
Hillary Clinton's
notion of a "durable peace" is as ethereal and other-worldly as
Kant's. And she and Obama know it.
Kant's 1795 idea of
a kind of League of Nations that would somehow enforce peace would also depend on
the "will" of its members, the "will" amounting to little more
than squeezing their eyes shut and, sweating buckets, wishing very hard that governments
and dictators and the authors of genocide just stop doing those atrocious things
because they're very embarrassing and give the wishers after peace pangs of
conscience and remorse. They'd rather not be bothered.
Thus, the
"ceasefire" that is merely a hudna,
or temporary truce, will benefit Hamas and allow it to catch its breath and
rearm and prepare for the next round of massacring Israelis and perhaps even
carry the butchery to the U.S. It's only
"fair," you see: Hamas is so outgunned by Israel that it needs time
to renew its stockpile of rockets and replenish the rocketeers who perished in
Israel's retaliatory bombings, in order to continue its campaign against the
giant.
Iran has boasted
that it has supplied Hamas with its rocketry with which to pummel Israel into
terror and submission. Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who
"brokered" the cease-fire with much help from Obama, has now assumed
dictatorial powers, insulating himself from all legal and political opposition.
Morsi, a power in the global caliphate-seeking Muslim Brotherhood, is a child
of the late Arab Spring, and the Arab Spring was a child of Barack Obama.
Some pundits will
claim that now Obama has a real problem on his hands, in the way of finding a
way to contain the ambitions and treachery of Morsi. They will say that it will
require the highest art of statecraft and diplomacy. But that is wishful
thinking. It is imaging that the conflict is no more serious than a difference of
opinion in the fantasy world of Friends.
Or in Elaine Benes's head. Neither Obama nor Clinton views the situation as a
"problem." They seem to be rather content with how things stand. After
all, they made Israel cry "uncle."
To them, war is
simply no good at all. The wrong combatant might just win if left alone to win.
And that would not be "fair."
irrepressibly liberal camp follower, promiscuous skank, and social climber – and
small screen progenitor of Sandra Fluke – remarks with reckless abandon and
shameless gaucheness to a Leo Tolstoy scholar:
“Although one
wonders if War and Peace would have been as highly acclaimed as it
was, had it been published under its original title, War, What Is It Good For ?”
Hillary Clinton,
Secretary of State, is Elaine Benes with arsenic for blood, the air of a
bedraggled, whip-wielding dominatrix, and a weight problem that seems to compete
with her credibility issues. She does not believe in war. She sees no good in
it. War is never "good." Its causes are irrelevant. War means
violence, which may spill over into her own life. War is so scary to her and
her ilk that there is no justification to discriminate between the combatants, between
the good and the bad, between the aggressor and the invaded, between the
civilized and the barbaric and homicidal. If any distinction must be made between
the parties, it should be weighted in favor of the underdog, in this instance,
Hamas, and not Israel.
If Israel didn't
exist, all Mideast problems would be solved. That is the thinking. Or not
thinking. So, because Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, is
"small" and is the aggressor picking on the giant, the world comes
down on the side of the bold and ugly midget.
Hamas, the midget,
can with impunity and global approval hurl rocks and rockets at the giant,
Israel. This is because Hamas knows that the whole world hates Israel because
it is a giant, a stubborn, recalcitrant one that refuses to go away and leave
the midget to his day in the sun over piles of Jewish bodies. So, Hamas and the
Palestinians get a pass. It takes a global village to hate one tiny country
that simply won’t roll over and play dead for the greater good.
Peace could be
secured if Israel would just agree to withdraw to its pre-World War II borders
and stop persecuting its marauding persecutors. Then no one need worry about a
nuclear bomb-armed Iran. Israel is to blame because Iran cannot tolerate its
existence and wants to wipe it out. After all, Iran's beneficent dictator and
font of all wisdom, Mahmud Ahmajinadad, claims the Holocaust never really
happened, and he wishes to correct that fiction by making it a reality. If Israel
were to immolate itself and just let Hamas and Hezbollah and Fatah and hundreds
of thousands of Palestinian zombies have their way with her in ways no one
wishes to imagine, all would be peaceful and just. The Mideast would settle
down and the only troubles one would hear about in that region would be on a
par with the banal disputes of Friends.
One almost expects
President Barack Obama to offer Hamas military air support. To judge by his
behavior, rhetoric and conduct towards Israel since assuming office, the idea
is not too fantastical.
John Rawls, in his
notorious A Theory of Justice , among
other things proposed that the competent, the able, and the superlative, be
hamstrung and penalized so that the incompetent, the disabled, and the mediocre
would have an equal chance at "success." Or at least the latter would
be awarded the appropriate handicap points to accomplish the same thing. This
was deemed a just system to achieve an equalization of results that would
"humanize" competition and preempt the envy, hurt feelings and
frustration of the incompetent, the disabled, and the mediocre. It is the same
"humanitarian" philosophy responsible for such things as soccer games
without scores, overseen by liberal soccer moms concerned about the self-esteem
of their kids and at the same time resentful of the boisterous pride of the
kids on the other team.
Contrary to the
age-old notion and ethics of sportsmanship, the Rawlsian concept of "fair"
is not playing by the rules and winning by the rules. "Fair" is the
tilting of rules in favor of those unable to comprehend the rules or unable to
win by them.
The Rawls notion of
fairness is also partly responsible for the theme here, for stopping Israel
from achieving a victory over Hamas and any of her past assailants and
permanently extinguishing her mortal enemies, thereby achieving some kind of
peace that Hamas would never break because it would no longer exist. That those
mortal enemies are killers who wish to do to Israel what was nearly done to
Lara Logan in Tahir Square – violation in every manner and complete
dismemberment and an agonizing death – is of no import to the humanitarians who
sweat like hogs to broker a deal between Israel and her enemies.
For the sake of
peace, harmony, and international amity, what's one beautiful woman's life
compared with the existence of hundreds of thousands of burqa-encased women
doing their duty to not be beautiful and so not triggering the duty of Muslim men
to assault them? What's the freedom of a single nation compared with the wishes
of hundreds of thousands of manqués who do not yearn to be free but rather wish
to be led, dominated and exploited as all of Allah's wingless chillun?
Hamas and Hezbollah
and Fatah are merely "freedom fighters" in Halloween costumes, ski
masks, and a weakness for Mein Kampf,
and we mustn’t judge them because of their questionable habits and psychopathic
penchant for totalitarianism. Their
feelings are hurt and pent up because the world will not grant them their
handicapped justice, never mind that their concept of the kind of "justice"
they intend for the Israelis is of the Zulu kind when the latter disemboweled
colonial Dutch women and men settlers they happened to have overwhelmed and
killed and paraded their children and infants on the tips of their assegais. Perhaps,
when they returned to their kraals, they also passed out candy in celebration
of their victory.
Lest someone
suggest that is a "racist" comparison, I could also cite Vlad the
Impaler and what he did to invading Turks, or the Turks and Kurds who savaged
the Armenians, or the Apaches and the Iroquois whose methods of torturing and
killing whites and other Indians rivaled in cruelty those of the Nazis. And, of
course, Islam's sacred documents describe and report numerous methods of
killing and torturing Jews, infidels, apostates, and others who do not submit
to all of Allah's and Mohammad's dictats.
Daniel Greenfield,
in his Sultan Knish column, "War is the Answer," about the alleged "cease-fire"
coerced on Israel by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, mentioned the ethereal
character of Immanuel Kant's plan for "perpetual peace." Kant is one
of Rawls's intellectual ancestors. It should be pointed out, however, that our
humanitarian diplomats are also motivated by one of the Prussian philosopher's
categorical imperatives, to do that which one "feels" is right and to
act to make it an ineluctable maxim, to "will" it as a moral law and
duty, regardless of the cost to oneself or to others, even if it means engaging
in a bit of nihilistic destruction.
Kant's notion of
"peace" is also responsible for the "peace" promulgated by
yesteryear's hippies and peaceniks, a "peace" without morality or
conditions, "peace" for the sake of "peace," regardless of
the cost to those who would lose their lives from its enforcement. And
yesteryear's hippies became Rhodes scholars and attained permanent places in
political leadership, academic, diplomatic, military, and policymaking circles.
Need I mention names?
Hillary Clinton's
notion of a "durable peace" is as ethereal and other-worldly as
Kant's. And she and Obama know it.
Kant's 1795 idea of
a kind of League of Nations that would somehow enforce peace would also depend on
the "will" of its members, the "will" amounting to little more
than squeezing their eyes shut and, sweating buckets, wishing very hard that governments
and dictators and the authors of genocide just stop doing those atrocious things
because they're very embarrassing and give the wishers after peace pangs of
conscience and remorse. They'd rather not be bothered.
Thus, the
"ceasefire" that is merely a hudna,
or temporary truce, will benefit Hamas and allow it to catch its breath and
rearm and prepare for the next round of massacring Israelis and perhaps even
carry the butchery to the U.S. It's only
"fair," you see: Hamas is so outgunned by Israel that it needs time
to renew its stockpile of rockets and replenish the rocketeers who perished in
Israel's retaliatory bombings, in order to continue its campaign against the
giant.
Iran has boasted
that it has supplied Hamas with its rocketry with which to pummel Israel into
terror and submission. Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who
"brokered" the cease-fire with much help from Obama, has now assumed
dictatorial powers, insulating himself from all legal and political opposition.
Morsi, a power in the global caliphate-seeking Muslim Brotherhood, is a child
of the late Arab Spring, and the Arab Spring was a child of Barack Obama.
Some pundits will
claim that now Obama has a real problem on his hands, in the way of finding a
way to contain the ambitions and treachery of Morsi. They will say that it will
require the highest art of statecraft and diplomacy. But that is wishful
thinking. It is imaging that the conflict is no more serious than a difference of
opinion in the fantasy world of Friends.
Or in Elaine Benes's head. Neither Obama nor Clinton views the situation as a
"problem." They seem to be rather content with how things stand. After
all, they made Israel cry "uncle."
To them, war is
simply no good at all. The wrong combatant might just win if left alone to win.
And that would not be "fair."
November 20, 2012
A One-Sided Suicide Pact
Soeren Kern,
writing for the Gatestone Institute in his November 16th article, "IslamNeeds a Fair Chance in Germany," reported a significant development in
Germany that portends dire consequences for that benighted nation and for all
of Europe: the city of Hamburg signed a "treaty" with organizations
representing its Islamic population.
The
"treaty" features a series of concessions, not by the Muslims to
secular authority, but by the secular government of Hamburg to the Muslims. The
"treaty," which requires ratification by the city's Parliament,
grants Muslims "rights" and "privileges" enjoyed by no
other religious group there.
The November 13 agreement, signed
by Hamburg's Socialist Mayor Olaf Scholz and the leaders of four Muslim
umbrella groups, is being praised by the proponents of multiculturalism for
putting the northern port city's estimated 200,000 Muslims on an equal footing
with Christian residents….
The most controversial part of
the accord involves a commitment by the city government to promote the teaching
of Islam in the Hamburg public school system. The agreement grants the leaders
of Hamburg's Muslim communities a determinative say in what will be taught by
allowing them to develop the teaching curriculum for Islamic studies.
Moreover, Muslim officials will
also be able to determine who will (and who will not) be allowed to teach
courses about Islam in city schools. In practice, this means that only Muslims
will be allowed to teach Islam and that pupils will not be exposed to any
critical perspectives about the religious, social and political ideology of
Islam.
Under the wide-ranging accord, Muslims
in Hamburg will also have the right to take three Islamic holidays as days off
from work. Up until now, it has been up to individual employers to decide
whether or not to grant Muslim staff religious days off on a case-by-case
basis. In addition, Muslim students will be exempt from attending school on
Muslim holidays.
The agreement also includes
provisions for the construction of more mosques in Hamburg, the upkeep of
cultural Islamic facilities, the authorization for Muslims to bury their dead
without the use of coffins, as well as the counseling of patients and prison
inmates by Muslim clerics.
Moreover, the
"treaty" will guarantee "broadcast slots alongside Protestant
and Catholic broadcasts on public and private radio and television, as well as
broadcasting council seats for Muslims with the northern Germany NDR public
broadcaster and Germany's federal ZDF television channel."
The German term for
treaty, vertag, occurs no less than five
times in the article. It occurs in the document itself. In the article, the term agreement occurs fifteen times. But the actual document reads, in a
loose English translation, "A Draft Treaty between the Islamic Community
and the Municipal Authority of Hamburg."
However, no matter
how many times the term agreement
appears in the article, a treaty is what
the agreement is. Islam is on a cultural or civilizational jihad against the West and all Western institutions. So, what is a
treaty? Is it a "truce" between the secular authorities and the
religious Muslims? Is it a "non-aggression pact" between two powers
vying for hegemony? Is it the granting to Muslims a "separate butequal" political status?
A treaty is commonly
regarded as an agreement between belligerent nations, states, or governments. The
Oxford English Dictionary defines treaty as:
3a. A settlement or arrangement arrived at by treating or
negotiation; an agreement, covenant, compact, contract.
3b. spec. A contract between
two or more states, relating to peace, truce, alliance, commerce, or other
international relation; also, the document embodying such contract, in modern
usage formally signed by plenipotentiaries appointed by the government of each
state.
A treaty between belligerents
indicates a cessation of hostilities between the parties. The Hamburg treaty
implicitly acknowledges that its Muslim "communities" are part and
parcel of the Islamic Ummah, or the
worldwide, global "community" of Islam. The treaty has implicitly
recognized the Ummah as a state to
"treat" or "negotiate" with. So, the "agreement"
is called a "treaty." The German government has not been waging cultural
or political jihad against Muslims; it is Muslims, especially those of Turkish
origin in Germany, who have been waging all sorts of jihad against non-Muslim Germans
in the way of rape jihad, jihad against freedom of speech, and jihad against Jews.
This is the situation
in all European countries now, especially in the western European nations of
Belgium, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Across the Channel,
Britain is succumbing to the same phenomena.
Out of a population
of about 1.8 million in the city proper of Hamburg, Muslims of various sects,
including the Alevi, a Turkish sect, constitute over nine percent.
Again, I think it
is significant that this agreement is consistently called a treaty. It acknowledges that Islam has
been at war with Western culture, and will continue to be until the
"peace" of a global caliphate is achieved. For the time being, in
Hamburg, its activists see a short-term gain in minimizing or playing down
their necessary and constant hostility. In Islam, this is an instance of Dar al-Ahd, or a temporary truce.
The "treaty," from the Muslim perspective, is also necessarily
an instance of what could be called "Grand Taqiyya," or the Koranic
sanctioning of lies and deceit when dealing with the enemy kaffirs and
infidels, especially in their own countries.
But these
"treaties" will turn out to be nothing but "truces," when a
movement is renewed to exact more concessions from the Germans. Call these
"treaties" for what they are: fleeting "non-aggression pacts,"
with Islam being the sole aggressor. Regardless of the nature or content of
these treaties, Germany will remain Dar al-Harb, the land of the enemy,
and Dar al-Kufr, or the land of the
kaffirs or unbelievers. It is noteworthy that all the concessions will be paid
by non-Muslim Germans as a form of jizya,
or "protection" tax. Germans will not "retaliate" against
Islamic aggression, for political correctness will silence them for fear of
being accused of racism or bigotry.
Islam, however, is
first and foremost, from top to bottom, a totalitarian ideology. Its doctrine
requires that Muslims and their spokesmen advocate Islam's own kind of racism
and bigotry.
Islam is a nihilist
ideology, as well. It is the enemy of all human values. In exchange for
submission to it, it promises a paradise after death. Life on earth is merely
transitory and not important. The Hamburg "treaty" is an extension of
that nihilism; it requires its secular signers to aid and abet the piecemeal annihilation of their values and their
culture. The Islamists know what they are doing. Their secular cosigners do
not. It seems the "right" thing to do, per a Kantian categorical imperative
to pursue an end regardless of, but especially because of, its selfless nature,
in the name of what Mayor Scholz called "the strengthening the societal foundation"
of Hamburg.
Which is tantamount
to injecting the bubonic plague pathogen into a human body in order to
"strengthen an individual's well-being."
Do the opponents of
the treaty take a principled stand against it? No. They remain as clueless
about the implications as Mayor Scholz.
The leadership of the opposition
Christian Democrats (CDU) has also expressed skepticism about the agreement.
Party leader Marcus Weinberg and party chairman Dietrich Wersich issued a joint
statement saying that although they welcome the conclusion of the talks, after
six years of negotiations there are key issues that remain unresolved:
"The agreements contain a number of points, the implementation of which
need to be clarified. For this reason, the CDU will not take a final position
on the matter until it concludes discussion with representatives of the
churches, with scientists and with lawyers. The unresolved questions involve detailed issues such as the regulation
of the school day, the teaching of religion in public schools and the
holidays."
The agreement has also been met
with vociferous opposition from the classical liberal Free Democratic Party
(FDP). In a statement, FDP Deputy Anna von Treuenfels characterized the
agreement as "an unnecessary and imprecise treaty unacceptably negotiated
behind the backs of the citizenry." She added: "Moreover, this
agreement is totally imprecise when
accuracy is required more than ever. On the issue of wearing religiously
motivated clothing by public servants, especially teachers [sic]. Even the
future of the heretofore successful interdenominational model of religious
education in Hamburg is being jeopardized. Plus the fact that the lengthy
negotiating process and final signature has been carried out without
parliamentary involvement is also unacceptable, yet another reason why the FDP
rejects this treaty." [Italics
mine.]
Neither group
identifies Islam as an ideology antithetical to their notions of democracy. They
focus on particular concretes of the treaty, but cannot or will not recognize
any links between those concretes and the overall ideology. That would be regarded
as "racist" or "defamatory."
It is noteworthy
that all non-Muslim school children attending public schools will be
indoctrinated in Islam by Islamic teachers. This is necessary to forestall any
future opposition to Islam's incremental takeover of Hamburg, and then Bremen,
and then all of Germany.
Such an agreement implies
that one or the other party will eventually be conquered or overcome. A "treaty"
implies that one of the parties is guilty of some past aggression, and marks
the end of active hostilities between them. A "treaty" of this sort,
however, acknowledges a surrender. Which
party here is making the concessions? Which party is surrendering, and which party
is granting the other the rights and privileges of occupation? Which party has been the actual aggressor?
When has one ever
heard of Muslims making concessions to the secular authority of a country they
have settled in? "We will stop harassing, beating up, and shooting Jews.
We will stop desecrating Jewish and Christian cemeteries. We will stop
vandalizing churches and synagogues. We will stop preying on white non-Muslim women
and raping them. We will stop demanding that people cease defaming, criticizing,
and mocking Islam. We will stop subjecting our women to clitoral amputation. We
will stop persecuting gays and apostates. We will stop murdering, maiming, or
disfiguring Muslim women who refuse to wear any kind of head covering or veils
or any other kind of effacing clothing. We will stop forcing our women into
arranged marriages. We will stop the brutal butchering of animals by bleeding
them to death while they are still conscious. We will stop demanding that
infidels and non-believers respect and observe our holidays. We will stop…."
Well, no, they won’t.
Why should they? They've got the tiger by the tail, and the tiger is a
toothless polecat.
What the Hamburg
officials have signed is but a truce,
a conditional cessation of active hostilities towards their city. The "truce"
will allow the Muslims to establish and solidify a legal occupation of the
city. It grants Muslims a "separate but equal" status. The "agreement"
acknowledges that, for the time being, there are "reconcilable"
differences between Muslims and non-Muslims. New differences, however, will be
touted by the Muslims, and more treaties signed.
The "truce"
sets a precedent and opens the door to more concessions by the secular government
of Hamburg to the Muslims, and the Muslims are certain to demand them. The Hamburg
"truce" will serve as a benchmark victory for the invaders and occupiers.
Farewell, Germany.
November 15, 2012
Getting the Hell Out of Their Way
In one of the climatic
scenes in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, John
Galt, the philosopher/scientist who is a prisoner of the government, is taken
to a televised banquet in an upscale New York hotel, arranged by the government
to show the world its new savior and to hear how he plans to save it. He is
prodded, with a gun stuck into his ribs through his tuxedo jacket, to make a
speech about how he would go about doing it. After all, his captors believe
that because he is a brilliant man, his brilliance can save their lives and the
nation. All he need do is think and issue orders.*
The camera moved to Galt. He remained
still for a moment. Then, with so swift and expert a movement that his secretary's
hand was unable to match it, he rose to his feet, leaning sidewise, leaving the
pointed gun momentarily exposed to the sight of the world – then, standing
straight, facing the cameras, looking at all his invisible viewers, he said:
"Get the hell out of my
way!"
Galt was expected,
urged, and begged to become the nation's economic dictator. He refuses. His mind
cannot be forced to solve a problem he does not wish to solve. Only he has
solved this particular one: The world can be saved – and the world can save
itself – by allowing him the freedom to think and to act, with no penalties, obstructions,
regulations, or force. He does not want to be a dictator. He does not think
that he needs anyone's or any government's permission to act in freedom. He wants
to be left alone to live his own life. What his captors do not understand is
that a mind cannot be forced to think. They do not understand that he would not
accept an impossible task, such as being Chairman of the Federal Reserve, or
Secretary of the Treasury, or an "economic czar" with the power to order,
force, or defraud a nation's citizens to act this way or that way. He refuses
out of self-respect and respect for his fellow men.
That is the light
side of this column.
On the dark side,
we have "Head of State" Barack Hussein Obama, whose snarling leitmotif
throughout his whole administration, on the campaign trail and over the last
four years, has been another kind of "Get the hell out of my way!"
This is the demand,
order, and wish of a tyrant, or of a wannabe dictator. He has his own
"plan" to save the nation, to save the world. Reality gets in his
way. Private citizens get in his way. He wants reality and those citizens to
get out of it. He throws tantrums when he does not get his way, or is asked
questions he cannot answer without lying, or when Congress or some
"old" thing like an article of the Constitution frustrates his plans.
He gloats and smirks when he does get his way with all the panache of streetthug who has "proven" to his ilk that he is an Alpha Male not to be
"messed with."
John Galt, as the
novel reveals, is a scientist, inventor, and creator. Barack Obama is a
non-entity who has created nothing. Literally. John Galt is a life-giver. Obama
is a nihilist and life-taker. Literally.
In truth, Obama has
no "plan," except to impose an authoritarian or totalitarian régime on
the country – somehow. He is a nihilist of the pragmatic stripe. Some things he
has gotten away with, some he has not. It
is too soon to impose complete, one-man rule. He knows that much. But, like all
seekers after power, his intelligence is feral, predatory, cunning, and
non-conceptual. He is the heir-apparent of a "progressive"
disintegration of the rule of law.
Obama can only work
from a "feel" for his enemies' weaknesses, and seek to exploit them. He
is a collectivist ideologue who has no idea of how to impose his will on the
country, except to cajole it through rhetoric and from a literal "bully
pulpit," with the emphasis on bully.
Or force. He has thrashed around for four years experimenting with various kinds
of statist policies, largely at the country's expense, hoping that they would work
and prove the efficacy of that force. He has exhibited an affinity for and an
empathy with contemporary tyrants, such as Vladimir Putin of Russia and Hugo
Chavez of Venezuela.
That force, after
all, according to the altruist code of ethics, was intended to "do
good."
It is appropriate
that his practical ideological mentor
was not Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, or even Adolf Hitler, but a
man who honed his "community organizing" skills and methodology by
hanging out with Chicago gangsters, that patron saint of intimidation and
isolating and targeting, Saul Alinsky.
He was successful in flattering
himself (his characterization) into the Capone organization and became a
trusted fellow traveler for "two years" according to his estimate. In
fact, the influence of the Capone gang on Alinsky is substantial and lasted for
more than two years.
"He introduced me to Frank
Nitti, known as the Enforcer, Capone's number-two man, and actually in de facto
control of the mob because of Al's income-tax rap. Nitti took me under his
wing. I called him the Professor and I became his student. Nitti's boys took me
everywhere, showed me all the mob's operations, from gin mills and whorehouses
and bookie joints to the legitimate businesses they were beginning to take
over. Within a few months, I got to know the workings of the Capone mob inside
out." Alinsky’s self-identification
of Frank Nitti the mobster killer as his "professor" is important. In
retrospect one can speculate that Alinsky learned a great deal about pressure
and intimidation from his friends in the Chicago mob.
But even more enlightening is
that the mob killer Nitti is the anti-thesis of what America is about;
amorality and criminality were what Alinsky apparently found so fascinating
about Nitti and his gang- they beat “the system” which Alinsky saw as just as
corrupt or equally so to the Capone/Nitti gangsters.
This is not a
minor, incidental, or arbitrarily juxtaposed point. I stress it because, as criminals
and criminal gangs employ force to impose their will on their victims, so do
statist governments. The Prohibition or Volstead Act of 1918, for example, sired
the creation and growth of large-scale gangs dedicated to violating the ban on
the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol. These gangs also
intended to "do good" by supplying the nation with alcohol, as well
as exploiting other prohibited or regulated realms such as gambling and prostitution
(the gangs would later expand into drugs). In every enterprise of these gangs,
force, extortion, blackmail, and fraud were their governing "ethics."
The crucial symbiosis,
in means and in ends, between government and "private" force is all
too apparent. Differing only in scale, they have ever complemented each other
throughout human history.
And, Obama has to
his credit several instances of speech that comports with his thuggishleitmotif, among them, “If they bring aknife to the fight, we bring a gun,” and, "Argue with neighbors, getin their face."
In Atlas Shrugged, the statists bypass –
and for all practical purposes, suspend – the Constitution (never actually
mentioned in the novel) by enacting Directive 10-289, which freezes all
creative and productive activity and expropriates property and wealth for the
duration of an "emergency" whose cause is government interventionist policies.
I discuss the ramifications of the National Defense Authorization Act in a
Capitalism Magazine article from March of this year. Ostensibly, the NDAA
simply details how federal expenditures will be distributed. However, a few brief, innocuous, but buried paragraphs
in the NDAA grant the government, Congress, and especially the executive
branch, dictatorial powers over the entire nation in the name of an undefined
"emergency," and effectively suspend the writ of habeas corpus, the
right to a trial, and sanctions indefinite detention – of American citizens.
The most notable
precedent for this is when Hitler got the Reichstag to suspend the WeimarConstitution.
After the Reichstag fire of 28
February 1933, clauses of the Weimar Constitution guaranteeing personal liberty
and freedom of speech, of the press, of association and assembly, were suspended…The
Reich President was authorized, "if public safety and order in the German
Reich are considerably disturbed or endangered," to take steps to suspend
"the Fundamental Rights…"
This was the
lead-up to Hitler's much-sought-after "Enabling Law" that would grant
him unlimited executive powers.
On 28 February 1933, the Nazi
conspirators, taking as their excuse a fire which had just destroyed the
Reichstag building, caused to be promulgated a Decree of the Reich President
suspending the constitutional guarantee of freedom. This decree, which
purported to be an exercise of the powers of the Reich President under Article
48 (2) of the Constitution, and which was signed by the Reich President,
Hindenburg, the Reich Chancellor, Hitler, the Reich Minister of the Interior,
Frick, and the Reich- Minister of Justice, Guertner, provided in part:
"Sections 114, 115, 117,
118, 123, 124, and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are suspended
until further notice. Thus, restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of
free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, on the right of
assembly and the right of association, and violations of the privacy of postal,
telegraphic, and telephonic communications, and warrants for house-searchers,
orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also
permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed."
As Leonard Peikoff
has noted, "An executive with unlimited power is the definition of a
totalitarian leader." When everything is permissible by edict, executive
order, or legislative fiat, then nothing can or will restrain the employment of
government force.
John Galt's
"Get the hell out of my way" is the expression of a man who knows he
owns his own life and warns his obstructers and enslavers that they will get
nothing from him if they continue their policies of force, sacrifice and
destruction. Obama's "Get the hell out of my way" is the expression
of a tyrant and sociopath who wants his wishes and whims realized without
reality and men getting in his way. It is the John Galts of the world from whom
he demands respect, deference, dependence, and obedience.
And it is the John Galts
of the world who will not submit and who will not sanction the Obamas of the
world the right to one second of his life.
The question for
Americans, now that they face four more years of Obama, is: Are they John Galts,
or are they craven submitters counting on being rewarded whatever messes of
pottage their masters deign to dole out?
*Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. 1957.
p. 1125. Dutton/New American Library, 1992. 35th Anniversary Edition.
November 11, 2012
A New Kind of Civil War
Now that all the
excuses, rationalizations, analyses, number-countings, hand-wringings,
finger-pointings, and tear-sheddings have largely passed, I feel that I can say
something about why, on November 6th, Mitt Romney lost his bid for
the presidency and Obama retained it. It seems that all that is left to do, for
someone who realizes that a second Obama term will be more destructive,
vindictive, and malicious than the first, is fulminate anew at a succession of
fresh assaults on liberty, freedom of speech, property, wealth, standards of
living, national security, the military, and on America from without and from
within.
I'm guessing that
about half the people who voted for Romney voted for him because he wasn't
Obama. The choice can be likened to voting for Barney Fife because he isn't Hannibal
Lecter. That was why I voted for Romney.
Other than recommend that everyone who opposed Obama just stay home and let the
Obamatons monopolize the polling places, there wasn’t much choice in the way of
action. Fife in the White House could
have at least stalled the movement to full statism and allowed some serious
steam to build up against big government – or of Hannibal Lecter not making a
meal of everyone.
But Hannibal Lecter
had the Chicago machine working for him and a brainwashed, idolizing fan club
that could be counted on to vote for him. They turned out to vote early and
often.
Romney's campaign,
on the other hand, was reminiscent of a large-scale drive to get people to buy
Girl Scout cookies.
Many who opposed
Obama stayed home because Romney waffled on what he really believed and charged
Obama with being an "extremist." Which is exactly why many disliked
Obama, because he was an "extreme" advocate of policies and programs
that were eating them alive or had targeted them for the cannibal's cooking pot.
They already knew he was a Marxist
extremist. What they wanted from Romney was a counter-extremism, one that was
point for point the exact opposite of Obama's ideology. What they heard instead
were approximations and equivocations and denials of being an
"extremist."
What many who
stayed home observed was that Romney's touting of financial independence and
freedom of choice contradicted his enactment of RomneyCare in Massachusetts,
which the administration has confessed served as the boilerplate for Obamacare.
What, in these voters' minds, could be the difference between a state-enforced socialist
program and a federally-enforced socialist program? There was no difference,
except in scale.
Obama garnered the
states with the most Electoral College numbers. Those are what count. And over
the years Democrats were "hollering" for the abolition of the
Electoral College because they said it was an anachronism and unfair, just as
they hollered for and got the popular election of Senators (formerly appointed
by the states), which, from a political mechanism perspective, undid the work
of the Founders. The Senate was created as a bulwark against populist movements
originating in the House. The Senate, as a result of this election, has become
an unofficial departmental adjunct of the White House. I'm betting the
Democrats are grateful they didn't succeed. Now it's the House that will need
to act as a bulwark against the Senate and the White House.
But House Speaker JohnBoehner has telegraphed that the House will not stand against Obama and the
Senate.
“Mr.
President, this is your moment. We’re ready to be led," said Boehner.
"Not as Democrats or Republicans but as Americans. We want you to lead not
as a liberal or a conservative but as president of the United States of
America.
“We want you
to succeed,” said Boehner. “Let’s challenge ourselves to find the common ground
that has eluded us. Let’s rise above the dysfunction and do the right thing
together for our country.”
When I read that, I
kept hearing Hitler saying the same thing to masses of uniformly clad zombies
held rapt by this oratory. Or Evita Peron addressing her adoring Argentines. Or
Mussolini daring anyone to smack his jutting jaw.
The people who voted
for Obama are morally corrupt. You would have thought that the Benghazi debacle
alone would have convinced voters that he was no good, that he was indeed a
nihilist prepared to sacrifice American lives to protect a failed policy. You
have to then examine what that means, which is that they don’t mind seeing him
destroy things, things on which their lives depend. You must grasp that they
don’t know what their lives depend on.
Or don’t care to
know. They just want it their way. They see no relationship between Obama being
willing to see American lives sacrificed in a pesthole and sacrificing American
lives at home. Or, if they do see the relationship, they don’t care to dwell on
it, because that would lead them to conclusions about Obama's character and
intentions which are not pretty and which they don’t care to dwell on. One of
those conclusions would be that Obama is a moral monster, a Moloch to whom everything
must be sacrificed, even their children. And that would imply that they, too,
are moral monsters.
They didn't want to
go there. They wanted to believe that Obama
and his policies are a causeless cornucopia of free things and social justice
and multicultural enrichment and diversification. And if some Americans have to
be sacrificed to make their fantasies come true – tough.
You would have
thought that the disasters and outrages of the last four years – including the
lying and posturing and being stuck with the tab of the First Family's million
dollar vacations – would have somehow penetrated the skulls of the most grotesquely
slobbering Obamaton. But you, the individual who had always assumed that you
own your own life and are responsible for it – not the state, not the
collective – reside in a moral universe that is an anathema to Obama and his
Obamatons. They are old and young, stupid and savvy, ignorant and learned,
naïve and street-smart, the clueless and shrewd, the educated and indoctrinated
– but all beholden to the state, to the collective.
They all want to go
Forward, and if that means trampling on your dreams, effort, plans, and life –
tough.
They will have
nothing to do with reality. TARP, $16 trillion and counting national debt,
Solyndra and other "can't fail" green businesses, Jeremiah Wright,
Czars, rising prices at the gas pump and the supermarket, these are all
irrelevant. Many voted for Obama because they're Democrats – can't you see the
tattoos on their wrists? – and because Obama gives them that old-time religion
feeling.
They'll be
gathering at the river until it runs dry because you can no longer carry their
water or have no more water to pour into the river. They'll be basking on the
beach on your dime and will remark on how pretty the tsunami is on the horizon
before it sweeps in and washes them and us away.
And they will blame
you for the drought and the tsunami.
You've warned them
for four years that four more years of Obama will see the collapse of this
country. They replied that everyone sees things differently, reality is just a subjective
"construct" and that your "perception" of things isn't any
more valid than theirs, but because their perception is "better" they
have a right to impose it on you and everyone else. They're
"differently" abled, you see, and you're just a bigot and a racist
and prejudiced against their crippled minds, and you ought to be penalized for
it because you're fully abled and have a duty to respect their flawed metaphysics
and warped epistemology and to help make their delusions become true.
To them, it was absolutely
imperative to preserve and perpetuate the welfare state and all the premises
that sanctioned it. Romney only seemed to threaten it (and he wouldn't have
actually begun to dismantle it, either, because he believes in it). This is in
light of the soaring national debt Obama has generated, the failure of his
programs, the cronyism of his rich and poor supporters, his thuggish and
adolescent behavior, in short, every evil thing that has happened in this
country since he took office – you would have thought that any one of those
things would have torpedoed his chances for a second term. But none of those
things mattered.
The election has
revealed not just an electoral division, but a division that goes deeper. The
people who voted for Obama in light of and in spite of all his transgressions
are the ones of whom one can't say that they "let it go." They never
had it to begin with.
What is it that they
either "let go" or never had?
The American "sense
of life." Decades ago novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand wrote an essay,
"Don't Let It Go."
Just as an individual’s sense of
life can be better or worse than his conscious convictions, so can a nation’s.
And just as an individual who has never translated his sense of life into
conscious convictions is in terrible danger—no matter how good his subconscious
values—so is a nation.
This is the position of America
today.
If America is to be saved from
destruction—specifically, from dictatorship—she will be saved by her sense of
life.
America is now
divided between those who have retained that "sense of life" and an
alliance of those who did let it go and those who never had it to lose.
Since November 6th,
I have severed ties with anyone I know voted for Obama a second time. There was
nothing to gain by continuing friendships or even civil relationships with them,
because they have shown that they are proof against reason and reality. I know
of no other way to demonstrate that I mean it.
Thus making it a philosophical
civil war. It's the children of the Age of Enlightenment vs. the spawn of the
Age of Envy and Entitlements.
excuses, rationalizations, analyses, number-countings, hand-wringings,
finger-pointings, and tear-sheddings have largely passed, I feel that I can say
something about why, on November 6th, Mitt Romney lost his bid for
the presidency and Obama retained it. It seems that all that is left to do, for
someone who realizes that a second Obama term will be more destructive,
vindictive, and malicious than the first, is fulminate anew at a succession of
fresh assaults on liberty, freedom of speech, property, wealth, standards of
living, national security, the military, and on America from without and from
within.
I'm guessing that
about half the people who voted for Romney voted for him because he wasn't
Obama. The choice can be likened to voting for Barney Fife because he isn't Hannibal
Lecter. That was why I voted for Romney.
Other than recommend that everyone who opposed Obama just stay home and let the
Obamatons monopolize the polling places, there wasn’t much choice in the way of
action. Fife in the White House could
have at least stalled the movement to full statism and allowed some serious
steam to build up against big government – or of Hannibal Lecter not making a
meal of everyone.
But Hannibal Lecter
had the Chicago machine working for him and a brainwashed, idolizing fan club
that could be counted on to vote for him. They turned out to vote early and
often.
Romney's campaign,
on the other hand, was reminiscent of a large-scale drive to get people to buy
Girl Scout cookies.
Many who opposed
Obama stayed home because Romney waffled on what he really believed and charged
Obama with being an "extremist." Which is exactly why many disliked
Obama, because he was an "extreme" advocate of policies and programs
that were eating them alive or had targeted them for the cannibal's cooking pot.
They already knew he was a Marxist
extremist. What they wanted from Romney was a counter-extremism, one that was
point for point the exact opposite of Obama's ideology. What they heard instead
were approximations and equivocations and denials of being an
"extremist."
What many who
stayed home observed was that Romney's touting of financial independence and
freedom of choice contradicted his enactment of RomneyCare in Massachusetts,
which the administration has confessed served as the boilerplate for Obamacare.
What, in these voters' minds, could be the difference between a state-enforced socialist
program and a federally-enforced socialist program? There was no difference,
except in scale.
Obama garnered the
states with the most Electoral College numbers. Those are what count. And over
the years Democrats were "hollering" for the abolition of the
Electoral College because they said it was an anachronism and unfair, just as
they hollered for and got the popular election of Senators (formerly appointed
by the states), which, from a political mechanism perspective, undid the work
of the Founders. The Senate was created as a bulwark against populist movements
originating in the House. The Senate, as a result of this election, has become
an unofficial departmental adjunct of the White House. I'm betting the
Democrats are grateful they didn't succeed. Now it's the House that will need
to act as a bulwark against the Senate and the White House.
But House Speaker JohnBoehner has telegraphed that the House will not stand against Obama and the
Senate.
“Mr.
President, this is your moment. We’re ready to be led," said Boehner.
"Not as Democrats or Republicans but as Americans. We want you to lead not
as a liberal or a conservative but as president of the United States of
America.
“We want you
to succeed,” said Boehner. “Let’s challenge ourselves to find the common ground
that has eluded us. Let’s rise above the dysfunction and do the right thing
together for our country.”
When I read that, I
kept hearing Hitler saying the same thing to masses of uniformly clad zombies
held rapt by this oratory. Or Evita Peron addressing her adoring Argentines. Or
Mussolini daring anyone to smack his jutting jaw.
The people who voted
for Obama are morally corrupt. You would have thought that the Benghazi debacle
alone would have convinced voters that he was no good, that he was indeed a
nihilist prepared to sacrifice American lives to protect a failed policy. You
have to then examine what that means, which is that they don’t mind seeing him
destroy things, things on which their lives depend. You must grasp that they
don’t know what their lives depend on.
Or don’t care to
know. They just want it their way. They see no relationship between Obama being
willing to see American lives sacrificed in a pesthole and sacrificing American
lives at home. Or, if they do see the relationship, they don’t care to dwell on
it, because that would lead them to conclusions about Obama's character and
intentions which are not pretty and which they don’t care to dwell on. One of
those conclusions would be that Obama is a moral monster, a Moloch to whom everything
must be sacrificed, even their children. And that would imply that they, too,
are moral monsters.
They didn't want to
go there. They wanted to believe that Obama
and his policies are a causeless cornucopia of free things and social justice
and multicultural enrichment and diversification. And if some Americans have to
be sacrificed to make their fantasies come true – tough.
You would have
thought that the disasters and outrages of the last four years – including the
lying and posturing and being stuck with the tab of the First Family's million
dollar vacations – would have somehow penetrated the skulls of the most grotesquely
slobbering Obamaton. But you, the individual who had always assumed that you
own your own life and are responsible for it – not the state, not the
collective – reside in a moral universe that is an anathema to Obama and his
Obamatons. They are old and young, stupid and savvy, ignorant and learned,
naïve and street-smart, the clueless and shrewd, the educated and indoctrinated
– but all beholden to the state, to the collective.
They all want to go
Forward, and if that means trampling on your dreams, effort, plans, and life –
tough.
They will have
nothing to do with reality. TARP, $16 trillion and counting national debt,
Solyndra and other "can't fail" green businesses, Jeremiah Wright,
Czars, rising prices at the gas pump and the supermarket, these are all
irrelevant. Many voted for Obama because they're Democrats – can't you see the
tattoos on their wrists? – and because Obama gives them that old-time religion
feeling.
They'll be
gathering at the river until it runs dry because you can no longer carry their
water or have no more water to pour into the river. They'll be basking on the
beach on your dime and will remark on how pretty the tsunami is on the horizon
before it sweeps in and washes them and us away.
And they will blame
you for the drought and the tsunami.
You've warned them
for four years that four more years of Obama will see the collapse of this
country. They replied that everyone sees things differently, reality is just a subjective
"construct" and that your "perception" of things isn't any
more valid than theirs, but because their perception is "better" they
have a right to impose it on you and everyone else. They're
"differently" abled, you see, and you're just a bigot and a racist
and prejudiced against their crippled minds, and you ought to be penalized for
it because you're fully abled and have a duty to respect their flawed metaphysics
and warped epistemology and to help make their delusions become true.
To them, it was absolutely
imperative to preserve and perpetuate the welfare state and all the premises
that sanctioned it. Romney only seemed to threaten it (and he wouldn't have
actually begun to dismantle it, either, because he believes in it). This is in
light of the soaring national debt Obama has generated, the failure of his
programs, the cronyism of his rich and poor supporters, his thuggish and
adolescent behavior, in short, every evil thing that has happened in this
country since he took office – you would have thought that any one of those
things would have torpedoed his chances for a second term. But none of those
things mattered.
The election has
revealed not just an electoral division, but a division that goes deeper. The
people who voted for Obama in light of and in spite of all his transgressions
are the ones of whom one can't say that they "let it go." They never
had it to begin with.
What is it that they
either "let go" or never had?
The American "sense
of life." Decades ago novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand wrote an essay,
"Don't Let It Go."
Just as an individual’s sense of
life can be better or worse than his conscious convictions, so can a nation’s.
And just as an individual who has never translated his sense of life into
conscious convictions is in terrible danger—no matter how good his subconscious
values—so is a nation.
This is the position of America
today.
If America is to be saved from
destruction—specifically, from dictatorship—she will be saved by her sense of
life.
America is now
divided between those who have retained that "sense of life" and an
alliance of those who did let it go and those who never had it to lose.
Since November 6th,
I have severed ties with anyone I know voted for Obama a second time. There was
nothing to gain by continuing friendships or even civil relationships with them,
because they have shown that they are proof against reason and reality. I know
of no other way to demonstrate that I mean it.
Thus making it a philosophical
civil war. It's the children of the Age of Enlightenment vs. the spawn of the
Age of Envy and Entitlements.
October 27, 2012
The Welfare State of Mind
I was recently advised by my office manager, who was responding to the
building manager's office receipt of complaints, that I could not smoke outside
near a side entrance to our office building, as I had been for years, because it
offended non-smokers who were coming and going and who claimed to be
super-sensitive to smoke, and also that somehow the smoke was also getting
inside the building where the slightest trace of smoke also bothered them. I was
advised to use the designated smoking area on the other side of the building. The
catch was that this area, too, is subject to the same conditions.
I cite this incident because it underscores a phenomenon I have watched grow
over five decades, from the first time I began to observe and evaluate men's
behavior to my current and far more incisive cogitations, which is how quickly
and easily men submit to government authority and the consensus of the
collective, and how inured they can become to being taken care of and
protected. The anti-smoking campaign that has been waged for decades is merely
one facet of the phenomenon. I suspect that much of the anti-smoking stances
adopted by non-smokers is feigned and likely psychosomatic. Having been
patronized and protected and legislated for by way of lobbies and pressure group
warfare, they are amenable to more of the same.
My gut response to the advice could have been any one of the following:
They don't own the air. Shall I wear a Star of David, too, so that non-smokers
can better identify and avoid me? What are they going to do about it? Beat me up?
Call the Green Police? Behave like picture- and video- and insult-maddened Muslims?
Pressure my employer to fire me if I don’t cave in? Ask the police to ticket
me?
But the welfare state is not just laws or legislative acts that encourage
individuals to become dependent on the State. The welfare state is first and
foremost a "state of mind."
A welfare state would not work if it did not inculcate, either by
education, by mandated indoctrination, by incessant propaganda, or by cultural
osmosis, the proper "state of mind" in a population, that is, to
instill in men an individual's alleged duty or obligation to submit to a
consensus propagated by a variety of authorities, especially government
authorities. A welfare state would evaporate almost immediately without first having
pulled a fraud on the electorate. However, a welfare state could not establish
itself without the overt or tacit approval of a large component of a country's
population. This consensus requires as well the consensual sanction or silence
of the targets of a welfare state and its vanquished, ill-informed, or willing
population and electorate. And if the opponents do not consent, they are simply
ignored.
The process of securing such a sanction is stealthy and incremental, with
the aim, conscious or otherwise, of eradicating that which the government has
deemed as wrong and not in the public interest, together with the steady
promotion of what a government has deemed to be in the public interest. It is
interesting to note that a government that legislates against, say, smoking, or
eating certain foods, or speaking truthfully about certain subjects (such asIslam), knows, as well as do the advocates of such restrictions and
prohibitions, that it can legislate "for free," that is, at the
victim's or taxpayer's expense, but to combat those restrictions and
prohibitions, it will cost the victim or taxpayer his time, money and effort,
with no guarantee of success.
Welfare state laws have a tendency to become inert and immovable. So have
welfare states of mind, which become proof against facts, statistics, logic, and
reason. Welfare state law becomes a boulder which only dynamite, or revolution,
can remove.
There was a time, a freer time, when today's non-smokers would have not
noticed the smoke around them, nor complained about it, nor feigned
"sensitivity," nor frowned with maniacal disapproval of smokers, nor
made faces or uttered insults and deprecations or cautions not to smoke. These are
the same mentalities who now check the mandated calorie counts on restaurant
menus, or automatically read nutritional information on packaged food, or
otherwise conform to the safeguards and wisdom of the moment, most of which is
sheer, unadulterated hokum advanced by government scientists and their partners
in the civilian world, the tax-exempt reformers for the public good.
If its propaganda campaign is successful – or if it thinks it is and puts
out the word that it has been, even if it wasn’t and most people have ignored its
imprecations – a government can pass a law without having to present much of an
argument for its alleged necessity, or no argument at all. As with the
assertions of Al Gore and his global warming friends, "The science is
settled," and there's nothing else to discuss. Look at how ObamaCare was
passed. Those countering the law must argue it in court or in books or columns,
and, most daunting of all, against the "conditioned" prejudices of their
next door neighbors, office mates, and random strangers who accost them with angry
and often unsolicited disapproval of their behavior or opinions.
Which brings us to this point: That most Americans have developed a welfare
state of mind. Whether or not it is European in color is irrelevant. They have
been "conditioned," or have allowed themselves to be
"conditioned," to become tolerant of totalitarianism, to become
tolerant of the intolerable.
Daniel Greenfield had
this to observe in his October 26th column, "Muslim Violence is Our New Law":
Laws are decided by many things,
but sweep away all the law books, the pleas from tearful mothers, the timed
publicity campaigns, the novel legal theories and the greedy bureaucrats
expanding their turf, and under the table you will find a gun. The first and
final law is still the law of force. The law begins with the power to impose
its will on others. It ends with the enforcement of that power.
Law either has force behind it or
it does not, and if it has no force behind it then it is an optional thing that
is subject to custom. And every now and then the law is challenged, not with
novel legal theories or with petitions, but with force, and it either responds
with force or submits to a new law. That is what we call revolution.
But law is not merely "force" or a gun under the table. It is
also a "state of mind" that can work to an individual's benefit, or
to his enslavement. It is unwritten law that employs the threat of social ostracism
and unspoken prejudice. The welfare state is merely soft totalitarianism, which
ultimately leads to the hard kind. It is the freshet of scalding water and rocks
that precedes the onrush of lava and pyroclastic
gases that can extinguish smokers and non-smokers alike. For a
concrete lesson in the progress of totalitarianism, read the fate of the West Indian
city of St. Pierre
during the eruption of Mt.
Pelée in 1902.
As the politicians
and "experts" of St. Pierre wished to assure the citizens that the ominous
rumblings and intrusions of Mt. Pelée were nothing to worry about, let's get on
with this election, politicians and "experts" have been assuring
Americans for decades that there's nothing to worry about, as well, so let's
get on with the business of life, except that you can't do this, that, and the
other anymore. St. Pierre was obliterated, and 28,000 people perished who
adopted a particular "state of mind" that their routines and
prejudices and customs and the urgency of an election were far more important.
Proper law in a civil society sanctions the use of retaliatory force in
answer to the initiation of force, against individuals and against a nation. On
this premise, 90% of the laws passed in this country since about the time of
the Civil War are illegitimate (read unconstitutional), because they sanction
the initiation of force against individuals or groups of individuals targeted
for regulation or just plain looting in the name of a populist "public
good." This trend has resulted in the establishment of an implicit
looting-by-principle welfare state. It takes time for the regulators and do-gooders
and social reformers to accustom people to it, to get them to accept their
wishes and laws as the norm and as how they believe men ought to behave in
private and to each other.
America has been governed by Progressive politics for nigh on a century. Progressivism
is merely a euphemism for socialism. Socialism is not Communism, it is not the
wholesale nationalization of everyone and everything. It is the conscription of
individuals to serve a "higher" purpose than their own existence
while leaving them a modicum of property and freedom to act and produce, so
long as their property and actions and production serve the government's purposes.
National Socialism is Nazism, or fascism. Men wearing jackboots and armbands
and kepis carrying banners with odd-looking symbols are optional.
The Progressives of the 1930's, for example, detested the German American
Bund, not because they disagreed with the Bund's national socialist ambitions,
but because the Bund was too blatant a tip-off to their own ambitions. When your
ambition is to draft a whole population into a campaign for eventual total
power, you don’t go around crudely parading your intentions. You don business suits
and flaunt your degrees in sociology and political science and economics and
apply for a seat with the Brain Trust and wail constantly that "something must
be done" about whatever it is that someone else is wailing about.
By way of coincidence, and to tie this essay back to the smoking incident,
on October 24th an interesting academic paper was published by Basil
Aboul-Enein of San Jacinto College in Pasadena, Texas, "The Anti-TobaccoMovement of Nazi Germany: A Historiographical Re-Examination." In it,
Aboul-Enein recounts the anti-smoking and anti-tobacco research conducted under
the aegis of Nazi science and research. After detailing the various programs
instigated by a régime determined to fashion a healthy, smoke- and alcohol-free
"master race" that would rule the world, astonishingly the author
approves of those programs. He naturally notes with disapproval the
"research" conducted on Jews and other "inferior" races,
but gives the anti-tobacco programs and propaganda a free pass.
Today, the case of smoking has
been partially solved by the discovery of the deleterious effects of passive
smoking. The fact that second-hand smoke can kill non-smokers has provided a
prevailing argument to interfere with smokers’ behavior. However, considering
the American Public Health Association 'code of ethics' regarding the rights of
the individuals to achieve community health, health education programs and
priorities should be thoroughly evaluated using courses of action and
strategies that ensure opportunities for input from the community.
No, let us not observe the deleterious effects of "passive"
smoking, or even of smoking itself. There are no credible studies or statistics
about especially "passive" smoking killing anyone, and those studies
and statistics are government generated or government-grant subsidized. Give a
"scientist" an a priori conclusion
to reach, and he'll "prove" anything to keep the money rolling in.
Aboul-Enein wanted his academic colleagues to be certain he wasn’t condemning
Nazi science:
The Nazis were primarily
interested in preventive medicine and public health to the end effect of
serving the National Socialist ideals of advancing a healthy and vigorous
German public. The promotion of these lifestyles only fitted the grand scale of
racial hygiene movement. Since Nazi wishes were to encourage its citizens to
live a healthy life, it seemed only logical that such a State sought to
discourage or ban what was seen as harmful to its cultural health.
Nevertheless, tobacco remained a legal product even under state funded anti-tobacco
propaganda and legislation. The level of ambivalence observed in Nazi
anti-smoking policies indicate the necessity for a clear and consistent body of
federal and state laws that present a clear message regarding smoking and
tobacco use.
German Nazis never had a monopoly on "grand-scale" hygiene
movements. The decades-old anti-smoking movement in America has branched out
into all sorts of realms, to food and soft drinks and exercise and even sex. That
was only to be expected. If you allow your mother-in-law to decide on the kinds
of curtains you'll hang, she'll wind up refurnishing your whole home.
Anti-smoking zealots in and out of government smirk at accusations that
they're behaving like Nazis or fascists. Robert Proctor, writing for TheAnti-Defamation League, however, puts an interesting context on Aboul-Enein's
findings, without having read Aboul-Enein's paper. There was something
inherently evil about all aspects of
Nazi science, including tobacco research:
The problem with the
"science vs. fascism" thesis is that it fails to take into account
the eagerness with which many scientists and physicians embraced the Reich, and
the many scientific disciplines which actually flourished under the Nazis.
Anyone who has ever examined a V-2 engine will have few doubts about this, and
there are numerous other examples. During the Nazi era, German scientists and
engineers either developed or greatly improved television, jet-propelled
aircraft (including the ejection seat), guided missiles, electronic computers,
the electron microscope, atomic fission, data-processing technologies,
pesticides, and, of course, the world's first industrial murder complexes. The
first magnetic tape recording was of a speech by Hitler, and the nerve gases
Sarin and Tabun were Nazi inventions.
The men who conducted the anti-tobacco research and vetted Nazi efforts to
eliminate it especially in women and employing the Trojan Horse excuse that it
was for "the children," were not paragons of moral esteem.
How can we explain the fact that
Nazi Germany was home to the world's foremost tobacco-cancer epidemiology and
the world's strongest cancer prevention policy? Do we say that "pockets of
innovation" existed in Nazi Germany, resistant to ideological influence?8
What if we find, on closer inspection, that Germany's anti-tobacco research
flourished not in spite of the Nazis, but in large part because of the
Nazis? And would it then be appropriate, from a moral point of view, to cite
such research in scientific studies today?
I ask this last question partly because the two tobacco studies I have just
discussed have, in fact, been repeatedly cited by postwar scientific
researchers, though rarely with any mention of the social context within which
they were carried out. There is never any mention, for example, of the fact
that the founding director of Schöniger and Schairer's Institute was Karl
Astel, Rector of the University of Jena, a vicious racial hygienist, and an SS
officer. One never hears that the grant application for the Institute was
written by Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, chief organizer of Germany's system of
forced labor and a man hanged after the war for crimes against humanity (most
leaders of Nazi Germany's anti-tobacco movement were silenced in one way or
another after 1945).
Far be it from today's researchers to be so fastidious and honest as to
cite their illustrious predecessors. Proctor cites many more of these creatures.
Proctor, however, is also torn between placing any value on Nazi anti-tobacco
research and treating any tobacco research today as a valid field that can
exist without government encouragement (or without the example of a
health-conscious Führer or Surgeon
General).
I raise the questions I do about
Nazism and science because it is poor scholarship and perhaps even dangerous to
caricature the Nazis as irrational or anti-science. What we have to look at
more carefully is the relationship between science and ideology at this time.
It is not the case, for example, that the papers on tobacco epidemiology I have
mentioned were uninfluenced by Nazi ideology.
This is indecisive hand-wringing. Proctor logically asks:
The complicity of German
physicians in the Nazis' crimes against humanity is a well-established
historical fact. Explaining that fact is far more difficult. Why were German
doctors such avid fans of fascism? Why did nearly half of all German physicians
join the Nazi party?
It is not difficult to explain. So many German doctors were of a welfare
state of mind. German philosophy, German culture, and that culturally inbred
deference to "authority" unique to Germany prepared them for it. Just
as so many American doctors are of a welfare state of mind, and are registered
Democrats, ready to submit to the intricate, ten thousand dictats of ObamaCare,
and who welcomed its passage because it guarantees them a release from independence
and allows them to work for a "higher" cause. One may say the same
thing about American insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and the
makers of medical and surgical supplies, not to mention middle-aged patients
and the "elderly," that pathetic generation of "boomers." My
"generation," by the way, which I've disowned.
Oh! Someone may cry: What about all those people who are really sensitive
to smoke? Well, it shouldn’t be anyone else's problem. You don’t advocate
putting shackles on everyone for the sake of a minority. Living doesn’t mean a guaranteed
existence. Living doesn’t mean nationalizing homes and restaurants and parks
and appropriating private property to placate and coddle minorities based on
their likes, dislikes, or "sensitivities." Those likes, dislikes, and
"sensitivities" can include the ingredients of food or the nuclear
composition of wall paint to accessibility of the wheelchair-bound to a 7-11.You
leave people alone to sort out their own business.
So, it's just not a matter of laws and legislation to force Americans in
the preferred statist direction. The British tried that in the 1760's and
1770's, and lost a continent. The generation that made the Revolution possible
was the "greatest generation." It did not have a welfare state of
mind. It isn't' even just about smoking or health, either.
It's about rejecting the notion that one owes allegiance and deference to
the collective, to the State, and to anyone who has "sensitivity"
problems with freedom.
building manager's office receipt of complaints, that I could not smoke outside
near a side entrance to our office building, as I had been for years, because it
offended non-smokers who were coming and going and who claimed to be
super-sensitive to smoke, and also that somehow the smoke was also getting
inside the building where the slightest trace of smoke also bothered them. I was
advised to use the designated smoking area on the other side of the building. The
catch was that this area, too, is subject to the same conditions.
I cite this incident because it underscores a phenomenon I have watched grow
over five decades, from the first time I began to observe and evaluate men's
behavior to my current and far more incisive cogitations, which is how quickly
and easily men submit to government authority and the consensus of the
collective, and how inured they can become to being taken care of and
protected. The anti-smoking campaign that has been waged for decades is merely
one facet of the phenomenon. I suspect that much of the anti-smoking stances
adopted by non-smokers is feigned and likely psychosomatic. Having been
patronized and protected and legislated for by way of lobbies and pressure group
warfare, they are amenable to more of the same.
My gut response to the advice could have been any one of the following:
They don't own the air. Shall I wear a Star of David, too, so that non-smokers
can better identify and avoid me? What are they going to do about it? Beat me up?
Call the Green Police? Behave like picture- and video- and insult-maddened Muslims?
Pressure my employer to fire me if I don’t cave in? Ask the police to ticket
me?
But the welfare state is not just laws or legislative acts that encourage
individuals to become dependent on the State. The welfare state is first and
foremost a "state of mind."
A welfare state would not work if it did not inculcate, either by
education, by mandated indoctrination, by incessant propaganda, or by cultural
osmosis, the proper "state of mind" in a population, that is, to
instill in men an individual's alleged duty or obligation to submit to a
consensus propagated by a variety of authorities, especially government
authorities. A welfare state would evaporate almost immediately without first having
pulled a fraud on the electorate. However, a welfare state could not establish
itself without the overt or tacit approval of a large component of a country's
population. This consensus requires as well the consensual sanction or silence
of the targets of a welfare state and its vanquished, ill-informed, or willing
population and electorate. And if the opponents do not consent, they are simply
ignored.
The process of securing such a sanction is stealthy and incremental, with
the aim, conscious or otherwise, of eradicating that which the government has
deemed as wrong and not in the public interest, together with the steady
promotion of what a government has deemed to be in the public interest. It is
interesting to note that a government that legislates against, say, smoking, or
eating certain foods, or speaking truthfully about certain subjects (such asIslam), knows, as well as do the advocates of such restrictions and
prohibitions, that it can legislate "for free," that is, at the
victim's or taxpayer's expense, but to combat those restrictions and
prohibitions, it will cost the victim or taxpayer his time, money and effort,
with no guarantee of success.
Welfare state laws have a tendency to become inert and immovable. So have
welfare states of mind, which become proof against facts, statistics, logic, and
reason. Welfare state law becomes a boulder which only dynamite, or revolution,
can remove.
There was a time, a freer time, when today's non-smokers would have not
noticed the smoke around them, nor complained about it, nor feigned
"sensitivity," nor frowned with maniacal disapproval of smokers, nor
made faces or uttered insults and deprecations or cautions not to smoke. These are
the same mentalities who now check the mandated calorie counts on restaurant
menus, or automatically read nutritional information on packaged food, or
otherwise conform to the safeguards and wisdom of the moment, most of which is
sheer, unadulterated hokum advanced by government scientists and their partners
in the civilian world, the tax-exempt reformers for the public good.
If its propaganda campaign is successful – or if it thinks it is and puts
out the word that it has been, even if it wasn’t and most people have ignored its
imprecations – a government can pass a law without having to present much of an
argument for its alleged necessity, or no argument at all. As with the
assertions of Al Gore and his global warming friends, "The science is
settled," and there's nothing else to discuss. Look at how ObamaCare was
passed. Those countering the law must argue it in court or in books or columns,
and, most daunting of all, against the "conditioned" prejudices of their
next door neighbors, office mates, and random strangers who accost them with angry
and often unsolicited disapproval of their behavior or opinions.
Which brings us to this point: That most Americans have developed a welfare
state of mind. Whether or not it is European in color is irrelevant. They have
been "conditioned," or have allowed themselves to be
"conditioned," to become tolerant of totalitarianism, to become
tolerant of the intolerable.
Daniel Greenfield had
this to observe in his October 26th column, "Muslim Violence is Our New Law":
Laws are decided by many things,
but sweep away all the law books, the pleas from tearful mothers, the timed
publicity campaigns, the novel legal theories and the greedy bureaucrats
expanding their turf, and under the table you will find a gun. The first and
final law is still the law of force. The law begins with the power to impose
its will on others. It ends with the enforcement of that power.
Law either has force behind it or
it does not, and if it has no force behind it then it is an optional thing that
is subject to custom. And every now and then the law is challenged, not with
novel legal theories or with petitions, but with force, and it either responds
with force or submits to a new law. That is what we call revolution.
But law is not merely "force" or a gun under the table. It is
also a "state of mind" that can work to an individual's benefit, or
to his enslavement. It is unwritten law that employs the threat of social ostracism
and unspoken prejudice. The welfare state is merely soft totalitarianism, which
ultimately leads to the hard kind. It is the freshet of scalding water and rocks
that precedes the onrush of lava and pyroclastic
gases that can extinguish smokers and non-smokers alike. For a
concrete lesson in the progress of totalitarianism, read the fate of the West Indian
city of St. Pierre
during the eruption of Mt.
Pelée in 1902.
As the politicians
and "experts" of St. Pierre wished to assure the citizens that the ominous
rumblings and intrusions of Mt. Pelée were nothing to worry about, let's get on
with this election, politicians and "experts" have been assuring
Americans for decades that there's nothing to worry about, as well, so let's
get on with the business of life, except that you can't do this, that, and the
other anymore. St. Pierre was obliterated, and 28,000 people perished who
adopted a particular "state of mind" that their routines and
prejudices and customs and the urgency of an election were far more important.
Proper law in a civil society sanctions the use of retaliatory force in
answer to the initiation of force, against individuals and against a nation. On
this premise, 90% of the laws passed in this country since about the time of
the Civil War are illegitimate (read unconstitutional), because they sanction
the initiation of force against individuals or groups of individuals targeted
for regulation or just plain looting in the name of a populist "public
good." This trend has resulted in the establishment of an implicit
looting-by-principle welfare state. It takes time for the regulators and do-gooders
and social reformers to accustom people to it, to get them to accept their
wishes and laws as the norm and as how they believe men ought to behave in
private and to each other.
America has been governed by Progressive politics for nigh on a century. Progressivism
is merely a euphemism for socialism. Socialism is not Communism, it is not the
wholesale nationalization of everyone and everything. It is the conscription of
individuals to serve a "higher" purpose than their own existence
while leaving them a modicum of property and freedom to act and produce, so
long as their property and actions and production serve the government's purposes.
National Socialism is Nazism, or fascism. Men wearing jackboots and armbands
and kepis carrying banners with odd-looking symbols are optional.
The Progressives of the 1930's, for example, detested the German American
Bund, not because they disagreed with the Bund's national socialist ambitions,
but because the Bund was too blatant a tip-off to their own ambitions. When your
ambition is to draft a whole population into a campaign for eventual total
power, you don’t go around crudely parading your intentions. You don business suits
and flaunt your degrees in sociology and political science and economics and
apply for a seat with the Brain Trust and wail constantly that "something must
be done" about whatever it is that someone else is wailing about.
By way of coincidence, and to tie this essay back to the smoking incident,
on October 24th an interesting academic paper was published by Basil
Aboul-Enein of San Jacinto College in Pasadena, Texas, "The Anti-TobaccoMovement of Nazi Germany: A Historiographical Re-Examination." In it,
Aboul-Enein recounts the anti-smoking and anti-tobacco research conducted under
the aegis of Nazi science and research. After detailing the various programs
instigated by a régime determined to fashion a healthy, smoke- and alcohol-free
"master race" that would rule the world, astonishingly the author
approves of those programs. He naturally notes with disapproval the
"research" conducted on Jews and other "inferior" races,
but gives the anti-tobacco programs and propaganda a free pass.
Today, the case of smoking has
been partially solved by the discovery of the deleterious effects of passive
smoking. The fact that second-hand smoke can kill non-smokers has provided a
prevailing argument to interfere with smokers’ behavior. However, considering
the American Public Health Association 'code of ethics' regarding the rights of
the individuals to achieve community health, health education programs and
priorities should be thoroughly evaluated using courses of action and
strategies that ensure opportunities for input from the community.
No, let us not observe the deleterious effects of "passive"
smoking, or even of smoking itself. There are no credible studies or statistics
about especially "passive" smoking killing anyone, and those studies
and statistics are government generated or government-grant subsidized. Give a
"scientist" an a priori conclusion
to reach, and he'll "prove" anything to keep the money rolling in.
Aboul-Enein wanted his academic colleagues to be certain he wasn’t condemning
Nazi science:
The Nazis were primarily
interested in preventive medicine and public health to the end effect of
serving the National Socialist ideals of advancing a healthy and vigorous
German public. The promotion of these lifestyles only fitted the grand scale of
racial hygiene movement. Since Nazi wishes were to encourage its citizens to
live a healthy life, it seemed only logical that such a State sought to
discourage or ban what was seen as harmful to its cultural health.
Nevertheless, tobacco remained a legal product even under state funded anti-tobacco
propaganda and legislation. The level of ambivalence observed in Nazi
anti-smoking policies indicate the necessity for a clear and consistent body of
federal and state laws that present a clear message regarding smoking and
tobacco use.
German Nazis never had a monopoly on "grand-scale" hygiene
movements. The decades-old anti-smoking movement in America has branched out
into all sorts of realms, to food and soft drinks and exercise and even sex. That
was only to be expected. If you allow your mother-in-law to decide on the kinds
of curtains you'll hang, she'll wind up refurnishing your whole home.
Anti-smoking zealots in and out of government smirk at accusations that
they're behaving like Nazis or fascists. Robert Proctor, writing for TheAnti-Defamation League, however, puts an interesting context on Aboul-Enein's
findings, without having read Aboul-Enein's paper. There was something
inherently evil about all aspects of
Nazi science, including tobacco research:
The problem with the
"science vs. fascism" thesis is that it fails to take into account
the eagerness with which many scientists and physicians embraced the Reich, and
the many scientific disciplines which actually flourished under the Nazis.
Anyone who has ever examined a V-2 engine will have few doubts about this, and
there are numerous other examples. During the Nazi era, German scientists and
engineers either developed or greatly improved television, jet-propelled
aircraft (including the ejection seat), guided missiles, electronic computers,
the electron microscope, atomic fission, data-processing technologies,
pesticides, and, of course, the world's first industrial murder complexes. The
first magnetic tape recording was of a speech by Hitler, and the nerve gases
Sarin and Tabun were Nazi inventions.
The men who conducted the anti-tobacco research and vetted Nazi efforts to
eliminate it especially in women and employing the Trojan Horse excuse that it
was for "the children," were not paragons of moral esteem.
How can we explain the fact that
Nazi Germany was home to the world's foremost tobacco-cancer epidemiology and
the world's strongest cancer prevention policy? Do we say that "pockets of
innovation" existed in Nazi Germany, resistant to ideological influence?8
What if we find, on closer inspection, that Germany's anti-tobacco research
flourished not in spite of the Nazis, but in large part because of the
Nazis? And would it then be appropriate, from a moral point of view, to cite
such research in scientific studies today?
I ask this last question partly because the two tobacco studies I have just
discussed have, in fact, been repeatedly cited by postwar scientific
researchers, though rarely with any mention of the social context within which
they were carried out. There is never any mention, for example, of the fact
that the founding director of Schöniger and Schairer's Institute was Karl
Astel, Rector of the University of Jena, a vicious racial hygienist, and an SS
officer. One never hears that the grant application for the Institute was
written by Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, chief organizer of Germany's system of
forced labor and a man hanged after the war for crimes against humanity (most
leaders of Nazi Germany's anti-tobacco movement were silenced in one way or
another after 1945).
Far be it from today's researchers to be so fastidious and honest as to
cite their illustrious predecessors. Proctor cites many more of these creatures.
Proctor, however, is also torn between placing any value on Nazi anti-tobacco
research and treating any tobacco research today as a valid field that can
exist without government encouragement (or without the example of a
health-conscious Führer or Surgeon
General).
I raise the questions I do about
Nazism and science because it is poor scholarship and perhaps even dangerous to
caricature the Nazis as irrational or anti-science. What we have to look at
more carefully is the relationship between science and ideology at this time.
It is not the case, for example, that the papers on tobacco epidemiology I have
mentioned were uninfluenced by Nazi ideology.
This is indecisive hand-wringing. Proctor logically asks:
The complicity of German
physicians in the Nazis' crimes against humanity is a well-established
historical fact. Explaining that fact is far more difficult. Why were German
doctors such avid fans of fascism? Why did nearly half of all German physicians
join the Nazi party?
It is not difficult to explain. So many German doctors were of a welfare
state of mind. German philosophy, German culture, and that culturally inbred
deference to "authority" unique to Germany prepared them for it. Just
as so many American doctors are of a welfare state of mind, and are registered
Democrats, ready to submit to the intricate, ten thousand dictats of ObamaCare,
and who welcomed its passage because it guarantees them a release from independence
and allows them to work for a "higher" cause. One may say the same
thing about American insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and the
makers of medical and surgical supplies, not to mention middle-aged patients
and the "elderly," that pathetic generation of "boomers." My
"generation," by the way, which I've disowned.
Oh! Someone may cry: What about all those people who are really sensitive
to smoke? Well, it shouldn’t be anyone else's problem. You don’t advocate
putting shackles on everyone for the sake of a minority. Living doesn’t mean a guaranteed
existence. Living doesn’t mean nationalizing homes and restaurants and parks
and appropriating private property to placate and coddle minorities based on
their likes, dislikes, or "sensitivities." Those likes, dislikes, and
"sensitivities" can include the ingredients of food or the nuclear
composition of wall paint to accessibility of the wheelchair-bound to a 7-11.You
leave people alone to sort out their own business.
So, it's just not a matter of laws and legislation to force Americans in
the preferred statist direction. The British tried that in the 1760's and
1770's, and lost a continent. The generation that made the Revolution possible
was the "greatest generation." It did not have a welfare state of
mind. It isn't' even just about smoking or health, either.
It's about rejecting the notion that one owes allegiance and deference to
the collective, to the State, and to anyone who has "sensitivity"
problems with freedom.
October 22, 2012
The Deer Crossing Principle of Social Policy
Listening to a
video recently that featured numerous stills of deer, deer crossing signs, and
of cars dented or mangled by close encounters between reckless drivers and
bounding deer, I had an epiphany: I finally grasped, for all time and for all
mankind, how statist economists and society managers thought. A new sun rose,
and I heard trumpets and a heavenly chorus singing "Hallelujah!" I
didn't quite experience "rapture," but it was very close that state
of exaltation.
The revelation was
this: Statists old and new, freshly minted and long retired, think like the
lady who called into a radio talk show to complain about deer crossing signs.
Not about the deer, but about the location of the signs.
Her reasoning, if
it can be called such, was that if the signs were placed at local roads and
highways with low traffic volume, there would be fewer deer casualties and
fewer crumpled cars. It made no sense to her to place those signs at
high-volume traffic locations. Wasn’t that obvious?
The host of radio
Y94, in Fargo, North Dakota, listened patiently to Donna – that was her name – and
refrained from audible smirks and guffaws while he explained in very simple
terms the purpose of the signs. He was a paragon of courtesy and tolerance and
public civility.
Now why, I asked
myself, would any rational person come to the conclusion that the location of a
deer crossing sign would have any effect on, well, deer? Or, rather, the proper
question to ask was: How would any
rational person come to such a conclusion?
Well, no rational
person would establish a causal connection
between the signs and deer. No rational person would ascribe to deer the
ability to read signs, or even grasp the silhouettes on them of leaping deer.
Perhaps not even the caller. We must allow Donna that much – in spite of
evidence to the contrary – for she does drive a car, and it has physically
encountered deer a number of times, much to the cost of her bank balance and insurance
premiums. She did not say that she had tired of exchanging insurance company
information with the offending deer, or had had mutual cuss-out incidents with
any one of them. Or so she claims. But she was clearly fed up.
No, the explanation
for this lady's reasoning must be
that the signs impart some kind of existential power over the deer. The deer
are like metal shavings, or filings, so to speak, and the signs are super
magnets. Deer magically gravitate towards these signs. Move the magnet and
watch the filings move. Move the signs, and watch the deer move. That part of
academia studying the metaphysics and epistemology of deer hasn’t quite nailed
down why deer follow deer crossing signs, just as scientists haven’t quite
nailed down what gravity is – is it undetectable gravity waves, volitional quarks,
or what? – although gravity certainly works. So should deer crossing signs. They
are preparing a major experiment on the power of deer crossing signs to
manipulate the impenetrable predisposition of deer to cross roads and highways.
But deer want to
cross the road, just like chickens, raccoons, possums, squirrels, and other
groundlings that are regularly squashed. The deer don’t necessarily take note
of the signs. They just show up near them, collectively or by their lonesome. Photographs
prove this.
Of course, a deer can
have the quirky habit of outrunning a car and deliberately crossing in front
it. It appears to be in a rush to play chicken with a driver. Or perhaps its
day just isn't made without a brush with metal and risking death or maiming by
a two-ton entity. Perhaps it is vain and wishes to show the noisy entity just
how nimble and agile it is. Deer anthropologists claim there are
"show-offy" deer. Such a deer is determined to cross the road ahead
of the vehicle. Its self-esteem must depend on it. Or something.
Anyway, back to the
complaining lady. She was sincere in her reasoning. Or perhaps she was pulling
the legs of the show's two hosts. But she sounded sincere. Let us grant her a
state of genuine perturbation.
You see, your
average economist and your average politician and your average teacher and your
average voter all think the same way as Donna. Never accuse of them of
harboring a dichotomy between cause and effect. Donna has a unique
epistemology; it established for her the causal metaphysical connections
between deer and deer crossing signs. Our group of averages is also imbued with
a similar epistemology. But Donna could never validate that knowledge, because,
well, she couldn’t. Just as the undetectable powers of Ouija boards and the
miraculous powers of pyramid hats can't be validated. One can't validate what can't
be detected, what isn't open to sensory perception. Or what isn't and never was
there.
Donna has reached
her end game. Her epistemology and metaphysics are the stuff of Road Runner
cartoons. And Groucho Marx's seven-cent nickel. And global warmng.
Paul Krugman,
champion of inflation and government interference and moving the country in a
different direction, shares Donna's epistemology and metaphysics. He believes
that if the Fed moves the deer crossing signs, the public will follow and cross
the road where he and Bernard Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
have designated the true and proper point to cross. Or rather, where the public
should follow, but too often does
not, thus throwing a monkey wrench into their best laid deer crossing plans.
Millions of metal filings fly in every direction but in the direction forecast
by the planners, usually as far away from the magnet or sign as possible. They
haven’t quite validated their metaphysics. Because their epistemology hasn’t
quite worked yet. They haven’t quite figured out the composition of those
countless metal filings. They seem to have minds of their own.
Now, take your
average socialist. You know, the one who wants to just "spread the wealth
around a little." Or a lot. One you will find in a stinking,
vermin-infested sleeping bag with Occupy Wall Street; the other you will find in
the meticulously clean White House, bacteria- smoke-, and class-free. They
together possess in common a cornucopia of deer crossing signs, in many sizes
and colors and styles. All property is theft, you see – they both agree with John
Reed, who was an acolyte of socialist-anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who
worked out his own deer crossing sign hypothesis before Karl Marx did (Karl
stole it from him, that was only fair) – so the OWSer and the White House guy
share the credit.
The OWS fellow
wants to maneuver the deer with baseball bats and curtain rods and pooper-scoopers
in the manner of Indian tiger-beaters and herd them in a direction that will
stampede them off a cliff. Just as those other Indians used to do to buffalo
herds, resulting in piles of dead buffalo at the bottom of a precipice, from
which Indians managed to carve out some edible buffalo meat and the makings of
a teepee and a wrap-around coat before the whole pile putrefied.
The average OSWer doesn’t
believe there ought to be any roads for any deer to cross, not until he first has
had everything provided to him for free, including a vehicle in which to play
"dodge the deer." Then he will deign to use the roads, as long as
they are always torn up by contractors and municipalities being paid with
stimulus money to repave those roads and confuse the deer who might want to
cross it.
Of course, once the
property is seized and redistributed and consumed, that is the end of it. There
is no more, not unless deer living beyond the range of an OWSer's deer crossing
signs decide to volunteer for the experiment and provide the OWSer with freshly
stolen property. To the Donnas of OWS, all property is also static, but that's
just a theory which doesn’t bear close examination, so they don’t talk about it
much. After all, there was the Soviet Union, and that experiment in deer
crossing signs finally collapsed much to the embarrassment of sign planners and
deer manipulators, and that section of the road was taken over by a champion
tiger beater by the name of Putin.
The fellow in the
White House wishes to maneuver the deer with executive directives and mandatory
health insurance and subsidized solar energy companies and an auto company that
produces cars that deer do not want to tangle with. He has the same deer management
philosophy as the OWS fellow, but has infinitely more power to experiment with
his policies, and a nasty army of tiger-beaters, as well. His rule of thumb is
simple and easily understood by the graduates of Sesame Street: If you change
the deer crossing signs, the deer will come. Just like in that fabulous Kevin Costner
movie about baseball fields and deceased baseball stars.
If you pour
millions into a solar panel company or two or three, the sun will come and so
will the deer. And if the deer don't come, then the molecular composition of the
crossing signs must be awry and not friendly to deer vibes. Or something. The
guys in the lab are working on it, following John Dewey's philosophy of
pragmatism: If you build it, and it doesn’t work, try something else at random,
such as putting deer into a super-microwave oven and setting it at full blast
to see exactly when they explode.
If you force banks
to accept billions in imaginary money and credit, prosperity and full
employment and economic solvency will come. All that money, causing the machines
at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving to hover close to over-heating and
breakdown, and all that credit, are the deer crossing signs. But now the deer
crossing signs are so numerous and thick that they form a barrier that deer
cannot cross. They remain across the road because they cannot penetrate through
the signs, and exhaust the foliage and begin to starve.
Deer crossing signs
were urgently needed in the Mideast. Dozens were erected at all the designated
crossings in hopes of altering the deer's social environment. The species of
deer that inhabit the Mideast, however, is particularly destructive, even carnivorous,
and have pulled down and trampled on all the signs, and have staged mass
attacks on passing traffic, such as cars full of female journalists and Coptic Christians
and ambassadors. These deer look like normal, peace-loving, plant-munching
deer, but the workers who attempt to erect the signs and befriend the deer with
handfuls of foliage have had their hands bitten off and their torsos gored. These
aggressive deer have taken over whole sections of the highway, and the sweltering
pavement is littered with human road kill as far as the eye can see.
This species of
deer is infected with an incurable strain of rabies. The Donnas of deer
crossing sign policy implementation refuse to send in professional hunters to
cull the herd or perhaps even eradicate the whole lot. Rabies is not, by Donna's
thinking, a disease, but just a different way of looking at things. There is room
on this earth for all classes of deer, even ones that froth at the mouth and whose
coats are thick with tics and chiggers and other viral bugs.
So, there it is. The
Donna principle of people management and deer crossing sign guidelines. Don’t everyone
get up and applaud me for the discovery. After all, I didn't build it. I must
give credit to deeper thinkers than I, such as Plato and Augustine and Kant and
Comte and Proudhon and Marx and Dewey and all those other guys.
The metaphysics is:
Reality is malleable, movable, and flexible. It can be anything one wishes. The
consequent epistemology is: Deer will cross wherever you erect a sign. Automatically.
Without fail. Except when they don’t and you must take a fistful of filings and
do it yourself with your back turned to the audience, or the electorate. That's
cheating, of course, but with artful sleights of hand, no one will notice. But whether
or not it works or is cheating, is irrelevant, because it accomplishes the
desired end. Deer or filings wind up in the right place, where they belong.
Will someone please
gag that guy in the front row who did notice?
video recently that featured numerous stills of deer, deer crossing signs, and
of cars dented or mangled by close encounters between reckless drivers and
bounding deer, I had an epiphany: I finally grasped, for all time and for all
mankind, how statist economists and society managers thought. A new sun rose,
and I heard trumpets and a heavenly chorus singing "Hallelujah!" I
didn't quite experience "rapture," but it was very close that state
of exaltation.
The revelation was
this: Statists old and new, freshly minted and long retired, think like the
lady who called into a radio talk show to complain about deer crossing signs.
Not about the deer, but about the location of the signs.
Her reasoning, if
it can be called such, was that if the signs were placed at local roads and
highways with low traffic volume, there would be fewer deer casualties and
fewer crumpled cars. It made no sense to her to place those signs at
high-volume traffic locations. Wasn’t that obvious?
The host of radio
Y94, in Fargo, North Dakota, listened patiently to Donna – that was her name – and
refrained from audible smirks and guffaws while he explained in very simple
terms the purpose of the signs. He was a paragon of courtesy and tolerance and
public civility.
Now why, I asked
myself, would any rational person come to the conclusion that the location of a
deer crossing sign would have any effect on, well, deer? Or, rather, the proper
question to ask was: How would any
rational person come to such a conclusion?
Well, no rational
person would establish a causal connection
between the signs and deer. No rational person would ascribe to deer the
ability to read signs, or even grasp the silhouettes on them of leaping deer.
Perhaps not even the caller. We must allow Donna that much – in spite of
evidence to the contrary – for she does drive a car, and it has physically
encountered deer a number of times, much to the cost of her bank balance and insurance
premiums. She did not say that she had tired of exchanging insurance company
information with the offending deer, or had had mutual cuss-out incidents with
any one of them. Or so she claims. But she was clearly fed up.
No, the explanation
for this lady's reasoning must be
that the signs impart some kind of existential power over the deer. The deer
are like metal shavings, or filings, so to speak, and the signs are super
magnets. Deer magically gravitate towards these signs. Move the magnet and
watch the filings move. Move the signs, and watch the deer move. That part of
academia studying the metaphysics and epistemology of deer hasn’t quite nailed
down why deer follow deer crossing signs, just as scientists haven’t quite
nailed down what gravity is – is it undetectable gravity waves, volitional quarks,
or what? – although gravity certainly works. So should deer crossing signs. They
are preparing a major experiment on the power of deer crossing signs to
manipulate the impenetrable predisposition of deer to cross roads and highways.
But deer want to
cross the road, just like chickens, raccoons, possums, squirrels, and other
groundlings that are regularly squashed. The deer don’t necessarily take note
of the signs. They just show up near them, collectively or by their lonesome. Photographs
prove this.
Of course, a deer can
have the quirky habit of outrunning a car and deliberately crossing in front
it. It appears to be in a rush to play chicken with a driver. Or perhaps its
day just isn't made without a brush with metal and risking death or maiming by
a two-ton entity. Perhaps it is vain and wishes to show the noisy entity just
how nimble and agile it is. Deer anthropologists claim there are
"show-offy" deer. Such a deer is determined to cross the road ahead
of the vehicle. Its self-esteem must depend on it. Or something.
Anyway, back to the
complaining lady. She was sincere in her reasoning. Or perhaps she was pulling
the legs of the show's two hosts. But she sounded sincere. Let us grant her a
state of genuine perturbation.
You see, your
average economist and your average politician and your average teacher and your
average voter all think the same way as Donna. Never accuse of them of
harboring a dichotomy between cause and effect. Donna has a unique
epistemology; it established for her the causal metaphysical connections
between deer and deer crossing signs. Our group of averages is also imbued with
a similar epistemology. But Donna could never validate that knowledge, because,
well, she couldn’t. Just as the undetectable powers of Ouija boards and the
miraculous powers of pyramid hats can't be validated. One can't validate what can't
be detected, what isn't open to sensory perception. Or what isn't and never was
there.
Donna has reached
her end game. Her epistemology and metaphysics are the stuff of Road Runner
cartoons. And Groucho Marx's seven-cent nickel. And global warmng.
Paul Krugman,
champion of inflation and government interference and moving the country in a
different direction, shares Donna's epistemology and metaphysics. He believes
that if the Fed moves the deer crossing signs, the public will follow and cross
the road where he and Bernard Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
have designated the true and proper point to cross. Or rather, where the public
should follow, but too often does
not, thus throwing a monkey wrench into their best laid deer crossing plans.
Millions of metal filings fly in every direction but in the direction forecast
by the planners, usually as far away from the magnet or sign as possible. They
haven’t quite validated their metaphysics. Because their epistemology hasn’t
quite worked yet. They haven’t quite figured out the composition of those
countless metal filings. They seem to have minds of their own.
Now, take your
average socialist. You know, the one who wants to just "spread the wealth
around a little." Or a lot. One you will find in a stinking,
vermin-infested sleeping bag with Occupy Wall Street; the other you will find in
the meticulously clean White House, bacteria- smoke-, and class-free. They
together possess in common a cornucopia of deer crossing signs, in many sizes
and colors and styles. All property is theft, you see – they both agree with John
Reed, who was an acolyte of socialist-anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who
worked out his own deer crossing sign hypothesis before Karl Marx did (Karl
stole it from him, that was only fair) – so the OWSer and the White House guy
share the credit.
The OWS fellow
wants to maneuver the deer with baseball bats and curtain rods and pooper-scoopers
in the manner of Indian tiger-beaters and herd them in a direction that will
stampede them off a cliff. Just as those other Indians used to do to buffalo
herds, resulting in piles of dead buffalo at the bottom of a precipice, from
which Indians managed to carve out some edible buffalo meat and the makings of
a teepee and a wrap-around coat before the whole pile putrefied.
The average OSWer doesn’t
believe there ought to be any roads for any deer to cross, not until he first has
had everything provided to him for free, including a vehicle in which to play
"dodge the deer." Then he will deign to use the roads, as long as
they are always torn up by contractors and municipalities being paid with
stimulus money to repave those roads and confuse the deer who might want to
cross it.
Of course, once the
property is seized and redistributed and consumed, that is the end of it. There
is no more, not unless deer living beyond the range of an OWSer's deer crossing
signs decide to volunteer for the experiment and provide the OWSer with freshly
stolen property. To the Donnas of OWS, all property is also static, but that's
just a theory which doesn’t bear close examination, so they don’t talk about it
much. After all, there was the Soviet Union, and that experiment in deer
crossing signs finally collapsed much to the embarrassment of sign planners and
deer manipulators, and that section of the road was taken over by a champion
tiger beater by the name of Putin.
The fellow in the
White House wishes to maneuver the deer with executive directives and mandatory
health insurance and subsidized solar energy companies and an auto company that
produces cars that deer do not want to tangle with. He has the same deer management
philosophy as the OWS fellow, but has infinitely more power to experiment with
his policies, and a nasty army of tiger-beaters, as well. His rule of thumb is
simple and easily understood by the graduates of Sesame Street: If you change
the deer crossing signs, the deer will come. Just like in that fabulous Kevin Costner
movie about baseball fields and deceased baseball stars.
If you pour
millions into a solar panel company or two or three, the sun will come and so
will the deer. And if the deer don't come, then the molecular composition of the
crossing signs must be awry and not friendly to deer vibes. Or something. The
guys in the lab are working on it, following John Dewey's philosophy of
pragmatism: If you build it, and it doesn’t work, try something else at random,
such as putting deer into a super-microwave oven and setting it at full blast
to see exactly when they explode.
If you force banks
to accept billions in imaginary money and credit, prosperity and full
employment and economic solvency will come. All that money, causing the machines
at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving to hover close to over-heating and
breakdown, and all that credit, are the deer crossing signs. But now the deer
crossing signs are so numerous and thick that they form a barrier that deer
cannot cross. They remain across the road because they cannot penetrate through
the signs, and exhaust the foliage and begin to starve.
Deer crossing signs
were urgently needed in the Mideast. Dozens were erected at all the designated
crossings in hopes of altering the deer's social environment. The species of
deer that inhabit the Mideast, however, is particularly destructive, even carnivorous,
and have pulled down and trampled on all the signs, and have staged mass
attacks on passing traffic, such as cars full of female journalists and Coptic Christians
and ambassadors. These deer look like normal, peace-loving, plant-munching
deer, but the workers who attempt to erect the signs and befriend the deer with
handfuls of foliage have had their hands bitten off and their torsos gored. These
aggressive deer have taken over whole sections of the highway, and the sweltering
pavement is littered with human road kill as far as the eye can see.
This species of
deer is infected with an incurable strain of rabies. The Donnas of deer
crossing sign policy implementation refuse to send in professional hunters to
cull the herd or perhaps even eradicate the whole lot. Rabies is not, by Donna's
thinking, a disease, but just a different way of looking at things. There is room
on this earth for all classes of deer, even ones that froth at the mouth and whose
coats are thick with tics and chiggers and other viral bugs.
So, there it is. The
Donna principle of people management and deer crossing sign guidelines. Don’t everyone
get up and applaud me for the discovery. After all, I didn't build it. I must
give credit to deeper thinkers than I, such as Plato and Augustine and Kant and
Comte and Proudhon and Marx and Dewey and all those other guys.
The metaphysics is:
Reality is malleable, movable, and flexible. It can be anything one wishes. The
consequent epistemology is: Deer will cross wherever you erect a sign. Automatically.
Without fail. Except when they don’t and you must take a fistful of filings and
do it yourself with your back turned to the audience, or the electorate. That's
cheating, of course, but with artful sleights of hand, no one will notice. But whether
or not it works or is cheating, is irrelevant, because it accomplishes the
desired end. Deer or filings wind up in the right place, where they belong.
Will someone please
gag that guy in the front row who did notice?
October 17, 2012
"Hate" Laws are Criminal
The end of freedom
of speech began with the invention of "hate crimes" as a means to
deter and punish crimes committed against an individual or members of a
designated or protected "minority." Hate crimes had their conspicuous
genesis under the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which criminalized actions against
individuals because of their race, color, gender, or national origin. This was
the first major step away from treating individuals as individuals, and not as members
of groups or tribes, and away from objectively defined crime.
Following it was
passage of the Federal Hate Crime Law of 1969 (18 U.S.C.
§ 245(B)(2)) which,
among other things, clarified or buttressed the definition of resistance to law
enforcement officers, including preventing individuals from voting or the like
because of their race, color, gender, and so on.
It was followed by
the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994,
which increased the penalties for "hate crimes."
This in turn was complemented with the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr.
Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, signed into law by President Barack Obama. (Incidentally,
this law was a rider to the controversial National Defense Authorization Act
for 2010.) The Act's name refers to two individuals, one a homosexual tortured
to death in Wyoming, and a black man who was tied to the back of a truck in
Texas and then decapitated. In neither state existed a hate crime law relevant
to their groups, and the perpetrators of both crimes were tried under normal
capital crime law. The formal name of the Act was a gratuitous sop to special
interest groups for political advantage.
The problem with
the idea of a "hate crime" is that it appends an irrelevant motive to
an action that would otherwise be treated as a felony, and makes the motive a
felony, as well. Further, "hate crimes" are complemented by another
invalid concept, "hate speech," also elevated to the status of a
felony, that is, a crime. While criminal actions cannot be divorced from
motives, up until recently motives were not punishable as state-defined and
state-enforced crimes, only the fact of a criminal action. That is, a criminal
action would be the initiation of force against an individual. The end or
purpose of the initiation is irrelevant. It could be robbery, rape, or simply
the malicious infliction of pain in revenge or as a means of visceral
restitution.
This dangerous and
totalitarian idea of "hate crime" has naturally migrated into the
realm of speech. Now the act of expressing a "negative" stance on
Muslims, homosexuals, and other "protected" groups is treated as a
"hate crime" compounded by the crime of "hate speech." Both
notions seek to punish the contents
of an individual's mind. However, no matter how repellant those contents, they
can never be objectively known, not even when a defendant describes them. To
make the contents of one's mind a legal liability, is a form of thought
control.
There is a double
standard in force, however. Rappers can denigrate women freely with as many
obscenities as are in their vocabulary. Muslims can call for the death of
anyone who "denigrates" Islam or Mohammad. Rappers are defended by
the First Amendment. Muslims screamers and sign carriers are also protected by
the First Amendment, regardless of how outrageously homicidal or offensive or
intimidating their rhetoric, but exempted from being charged with "hate
speech" because they are now a special "protected" class who are
merely expressing their "pain" and "offended feelings."
Muslims are even excused from actual crimes such as physical assault with
wrist-slaps, even though they may have employed "hate speech" in the
commission of a provable crime.
But Bryan Jennings,
who got into an argument with a Muslim cab driver, and who expressed his
feelings about the cab driver, was treated as a felon. He was fortunate that a
judge ruled on the matter on a technicality created by a clueless and victimhood-seeking
Muslim.
Muslim
organizations such as CAIR and its numerous ideological affiliates such as ICNA
(allied with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, or OIC) wish to convert
the First Amendment from a guarantee of freedom of speech to a punishable
"freedom from speech" tool to silence criticism, whether that
criticism takes the form of scholarly disquisitions or crude cartoons or just
plain from-the-gut expressions of dislike or fear of Islam and Muslims.
The concepts of
"hate crime" and "hate speech," together or separately, are
a form of totalitarian gangrene spreading throughout America's judicial system.
Does anyone else see where this is leading?
The notion of
Orwellian "thought crime," once regarded as an impossibility in this
country, has in fact taken root, doubtless fueled by political correctness and
politically correct speech and group warfare, with the consequence that more
and more Americans – dare we say it? – are afraid to think. Because to think is
to court disaster and put oneself in a potential state of double jeopardy. This
is dependent on whether or not they even know there is an issue.
So, why bother to
think?
Dark Ages do not
just suddenly happen. They begin when men begin turning off the lights of their
minds. There is only one duty an individual is obliged to fulfill, and that is
to think, and that is for his self-preservation. Neglect that duty, or abdicate it, and one's
life may or may not be preserved at the whim of another.
However, let's run
down a short list of various notions of criminal law and how restrictions on
freedom of speech can be rationalized and imposed by the state using criminal
law at the behest of Muslims, their Islamic mouthpieces, and their "civil
rights" advocates. Insofar as Islam is concerned, "hate speech"
or a "hate crime" can be anything from satirizing Islam, Mohammad, or
Muslims in a cartoon or video, to burning a copy of the Koran, to telling a
Muslim to "go back where he came from," to innocuous jests, to
writing a learned and critical treatise on Islam.
Vicarious
liability: This
concept places the "public interest" above "private
interest" and is concerned with the actions of an employer's employees. If
I happen to be employed, and write something that offends Muslims but wrote it
outside my employer's office and on my own time, it is possible that a court
could hold the employer responsible for not having imposed any number of
speech-deterring or preventative incentives to still my pen. Whether or not I
had any criminal intent, would be irrelevant. Nor would my intent to educate or
entertain others be relevant. Whether or not my employer had any right to
impose those incentives would be irrelevant. The "public interest"
would be construed as an absence of rioting Muslims. My speech "incited"
rioting. The rioters would be held blameless. Ergo, the employer must be
punished.
If my speech
violated Congressionally- or federally-imposed restrictions on speech (say, at
the behest of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the OIC through United
Nations resolution 16/18), my employer's innocence in the matter would also be
irrelevant. He would be held responsible for my actions, whether or not he had
knowledge of them.
Conspiracy: A conspiracy requires at least
two persons to plot to take a criminal action, or an action defined by a
government to be criminal. If criticism of Islam, Mohammad, or Muslims is
deemed a criminal offense, then Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Steve Emerson,
Raymond Ibrahim, Nonie Darwish, Daniel Greenfield, Caroline Glick, and a host
of other critics of Islam could be charged with conspiracy to "harm"
Muslims, or hurt their "feelings," or violate their
"sensitivities," acting in formal or informal compact, independently,
or all together or in pairs or threes. The criminal action would be defined as
a "plot" to hurt the feelings and sensitivities of Muslims with
criticism of their religion, even though the criticism would be limited to the
content of Islam's primary documents, such as the Koran, the Hadith and The Reliance of the Traveler, in order
to highlight in those documents the numerous Islamic imperatives to initiate
force against non-Muslims.
Suppose, by some
miracle of oversight, the government treated criticism of Islam as a
"legal" end, but deemed a certain quality, tone or form of criticism "illegal,"
"irresponsible," and beyond the pale of civil inquiry or discourse.
If CAIR or some other Muslim organization decided to file suit based on a
perceived illegal form of criticism, the resolution of the case would depend
entirely on a judge's or court's arbitrary and subjective interpretation of the
offense. It may find for or against the plaintiff. The purpose of such a suit
would not be justice, but vengeance for having spoken one's mind, and to
exhaust the defendant's financial resources through attorney and court costs.
Several states have passed laws invalidating "libel tourism," that
is, suits brought against individuals in this country by Muslims in another country,
particularly in Britain.
Assault
and/or Battery: Criminal
or aggravated assault entails the
physical initiation of force against another individual, with or without a
weapon, with the intent to inflict bodily harm, compounded or not in the
commission of another crime, such as robbery, rape, or simply harassment or
intimidation. Battery is the
unsolicited contact of another person, such as "buttonholing" him,
jabbing a finger on his chest, grabbing his shirtsleeve, with no intent to
inflict bodily harm. It is usually construed as unlawful detention if the
victim did not wish to be "detained" by the aggressor and had no
recourse but to "get physical" with the perpetrator, if he so chose.
The notorious Rutgers case, which involved no physical contact at all between
the defendant and the "injured" but the use of a webcam, saw the
coining of another euphemism for "hate crime": bias intimidation.
Muslims and their
spokesmen repeatedly claim that Islam, Muslims, Mohammad, the Koran are under "assault" by
their critics and that their "defamation" constitutes nearly literal
physical assault, when in fact, all that can result from written, verbal or
visual criticism of Islam in any form is "emotional cruelty"
experienced by Muslims. But just as a man can ignore an insult and walk away,
Muslims are free to do the same thing.
Instead, practically
all criticism of Islam is regarded as "hurtful" and an "insult,"
and Muslims and their advocates continually seek "justice" or
restitution of or compensation for their lost "dignity" in courts.
All a Muslim need do is assert some form of (unprovable) anguish (or a
diminution of his mental and/or emotional well-being) as a result of the
"inhuman" treatment of legitimate criticism, and is regarded as a virtual physical assault. There are
irreconcilable differences between American law and Sharia, but Sharia, because
it is a "religious" code, is frequently countenanced as a legitimate moral
code that must not be amended or adulterated by secular law.
After all, secular
or man-made law is an abomination in Islam. See "Three Things You(Probably) Did Not Know About Islam" at minute 3:58 for an explanation of
this crucial facet of Islamic activism.
One would imagine,
and with ample justification, that the purpose of these suits is to "divorce"
Muslims from secular law, and to accord them "separate but equal"
status. But there can be no feasible "separate but equal"
relationship between a country's secular law and Sharia. One or the other must
sooner or later dominate. That is the inevitable nature of compromise. Any
compromise would be secular law's, not Islam's, for Islamic doctrine forbidscompromise. Islamists are working assiduously to ensure that Sharia dominates,
and if successful, they will with blaring trumpets and calls from the minarets
announce the end of freedom of speech and the reign of "freedom from
speech."
Libel
and Slander: These are two favorite terms employed by Islamist
supremacists when charging critics of Islam with "hate speech" or
"insensitivity." One might
"libel" or "defame" Islam, Mohammad, or Muslims by writing,
broadcasting, or otherwise publishing in words or in recordings statements or
images critical of Islam, Mohammad, or Muslims, yet "perceived" by
Islamic authorities or lawyers as malicious or false or defamatory in nature,
resulting in a loss of one of those overrated intangibles, "respect"
or "esteem" or "dignity."
One might "slander" them by verbally making "false"
or "malicious" statements. In both instances, the statements must be
addressed to persons other than the
subjects.
But the champions
of Islam hunt for offense and insult, and are perfidious eavesdroppers, as well.
They always manage to find something "hurtful."
Islam is alleged to
be an efficacious and powerful creed, yet it seems to be so sensitive to
criticism as to be an ideological hypochondriac, always complaining about
something. One expects it to succumb any day now. Mohammad, if he actually
existed, has been dead 1,400 years, and so is beyond libel or slander. In point of fact, his personal and private
life is a goldmine of supermarket tabloid gossip, much of it recorded telltale
in the Koran and Hadith, sordidly reminiscent of the private lives of the Kennedy
clan and Bill Clinton but far, far worse. The things revealed in Islamic
documents about this "role model" constitute a rap sheet of serious felonies
a mile long. He is a perfect subject to be ridiculed, mocked, or caricatured,
as much as Adolf Hitler and Mussolini, and Neville Chamberlain. Or Barack Obama.
Such a figure deserves contempt and hilarity, not "respect."
As for Muslims,
Mohammad is their icon and "prophet," and if they revere his alleged
"wisdom" (if not his image, for that is forbidden), neither are they
deserving of respect. You stay away from people whom you learn idolize Al Capone,
John Dillinger, and Bonnie and Clyde as paragons of virtue and goodness. You give
the cold shoulder to people whom you know idolize a mass murderer, mass rapist,
genocidal maniac, and slitter of throats and tongues and who threaten mayhem if
you take his name in vain.
"Hate crimes"
and "hate speech" are the weapons employed by Islamists and secular
statists to silence their critics. They are the shipworms of objective law,
burrowing randomly but determinedly through its timbers oblivious to the time when
the judicial structure of law, weakened by a maze of rotting tunnels and gaping
caverns, must someday collapse into anarchy and ultimately tyranny.
The champions of
"hate crime" and "hate speech" know this. This is why
freedom of speech must be upheld and defended with our utmost energy and
dedication. For our own self-preservation, we must oppose turning the First
Amendment into a felony offense.
of speech began with the invention of "hate crimes" as a means to
deter and punish crimes committed against an individual or members of a
designated or protected "minority." Hate crimes had their conspicuous
genesis under the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which criminalized actions against
individuals because of their race, color, gender, or national origin. This was
the first major step away from treating individuals as individuals, and not as members
of groups or tribes, and away from objectively defined crime.
Following it was
passage of the Federal Hate Crime Law of 1969 (18 U.S.C.
§ 245(B)(2)) which,
among other things, clarified or buttressed the definition of resistance to law
enforcement officers, including preventing individuals from voting or the like
because of their race, color, gender, and so on.
It was followed by
the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994,
which increased the penalties for "hate crimes."
This in turn was complemented with the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr.
Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, signed into law by President Barack Obama. (Incidentally,
this law was a rider to the controversial National Defense Authorization Act
for 2010.) The Act's name refers to two individuals, one a homosexual tortured
to death in Wyoming, and a black man who was tied to the back of a truck in
Texas and then decapitated. In neither state existed a hate crime law relevant
to their groups, and the perpetrators of both crimes were tried under normal
capital crime law. The formal name of the Act was a gratuitous sop to special
interest groups for political advantage.
The problem with
the idea of a "hate crime" is that it appends an irrelevant motive to
an action that would otherwise be treated as a felony, and makes the motive a
felony, as well. Further, "hate crimes" are complemented by another
invalid concept, "hate speech," also elevated to the status of a
felony, that is, a crime. While criminal actions cannot be divorced from
motives, up until recently motives were not punishable as state-defined and
state-enforced crimes, only the fact of a criminal action. That is, a criminal
action would be the initiation of force against an individual. The end or
purpose of the initiation is irrelevant. It could be robbery, rape, or simply
the malicious infliction of pain in revenge or as a means of visceral
restitution.
This dangerous and
totalitarian idea of "hate crime" has naturally migrated into the
realm of speech. Now the act of expressing a "negative" stance on
Muslims, homosexuals, and other "protected" groups is treated as a
"hate crime" compounded by the crime of "hate speech." Both
notions seek to punish the contents
of an individual's mind. However, no matter how repellant those contents, they
can never be objectively known, not even when a defendant describes them. To
make the contents of one's mind a legal liability, is a form of thought
control.
There is a double
standard in force, however. Rappers can denigrate women freely with as many
obscenities as are in their vocabulary. Muslims can call for the death of
anyone who "denigrates" Islam or Mohammad. Rappers are defended by
the First Amendment. Muslims screamers and sign carriers are also protected by
the First Amendment, regardless of how outrageously homicidal or offensive or
intimidating their rhetoric, but exempted from being charged with "hate
speech" because they are now a special "protected" class who are
merely expressing their "pain" and "offended feelings."
Muslims are even excused from actual crimes such as physical assault with
wrist-slaps, even though they may have employed "hate speech" in the
commission of a provable crime.
But Bryan Jennings,
who got into an argument with a Muslim cab driver, and who expressed his
feelings about the cab driver, was treated as a felon. He was fortunate that a
judge ruled on the matter on a technicality created by a clueless and victimhood-seeking
Muslim.
Muslim
organizations such as CAIR and its numerous ideological affiliates such as ICNA
(allied with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, or OIC) wish to convert
the First Amendment from a guarantee of freedom of speech to a punishable
"freedom from speech" tool to silence criticism, whether that
criticism takes the form of scholarly disquisitions or crude cartoons or just
plain from-the-gut expressions of dislike or fear of Islam and Muslims.
The concepts of
"hate crime" and "hate speech," together or separately, are
a form of totalitarian gangrene spreading throughout America's judicial system.
Does anyone else see where this is leading?
The notion of
Orwellian "thought crime," once regarded as an impossibility in this
country, has in fact taken root, doubtless fueled by political correctness and
politically correct speech and group warfare, with the consequence that more
and more Americans – dare we say it? – are afraid to think. Because to think is
to court disaster and put oneself in a potential state of double jeopardy. This
is dependent on whether or not they even know there is an issue.
So, why bother to
think?
Dark Ages do not
just suddenly happen. They begin when men begin turning off the lights of their
minds. There is only one duty an individual is obliged to fulfill, and that is
to think, and that is for his self-preservation. Neglect that duty, or abdicate it, and one's
life may or may not be preserved at the whim of another.
However, let's run
down a short list of various notions of criminal law and how restrictions on
freedom of speech can be rationalized and imposed by the state using criminal
law at the behest of Muslims, their Islamic mouthpieces, and their "civil
rights" advocates. Insofar as Islam is concerned, "hate speech"
or a "hate crime" can be anything from satirizing Islam, Mohammad, or
Muslims in a cartoon or video, to burning a copy of the Koran, to telling a
Muslim to "go back where he came from," to innocuous jests, to
writing a learned and critical treatise on Islam.
Vicarious
liability: This
concept places the "public interest" above "private
interest" and is concerned with the actions of an employer's employees. If
I happen to be employed, and write something that offends Muslims but wrote it
outside my employer's office and on my own time, it is possible that a court
could hold the employer responsible for not having imposed any number of
speech-deterring or preventative incentives to still my pen. Whether or not I
had any criminal intent, would be irrelevant. Nor would my intent to educate or
entertain others be relevant. Whether or not my employer had any right to
impose those incentives would be irrelevant. The "public interest"
would be construed as an absence of rioting Muslims. My speech "incited"
rioting. The rioters would be held blameless. Ergo, the employer must be
punished.
If my speech
violated Congressionally- or federally-imposed restrictions on speech (say, at
the behest of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the OIC through United
Nations resolution 16/18), my employer's innocence in the matter would also be
irrelevant. He would be held responsible for my actions, whether or not he had
knowledge of them.
Conspiracy: A conspiracy requires at least
two persons to plot to take a criminal action, or an action defined by a
government to be criminal. If criticism of Islam, Mohammad, or Muslims is
deemed a criminal offense, then Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Steve Emerson,
Raymond Ibrahim, Nonie Darwish, Daniel Greenfield, Caroline Glick, and a host
of other critics of Islam could be charged with conspiracy to "harm"
Muslims, or hurt their "feelings," or violate their
"sensitivities," acting in formal or informal compact, independently,
or all together or in pairs or threes. The criminal action would be defined as
a "plot" to hurt the feelings and sensitivities of Muslims with
criticism of their religion, even though the criticism would be limited to the
content of Islam's primary documents, such as the Koran, the Hadith and The Reliance of the Traveler, in order
to highlight in those documents the numerous Islamic imperatives to initiate
force against non-Muslims.
Suppose, by some
miracle of oversight, the government treated criticism of Islam as a
"legal" end, but deemed a certain quality, tone or form of criticism "illegal,"
"irresponsible," and beyond the pale of civil inquiry or discourse.
If CAIR or some other Muslim organization decided to file suit based on a
perceived illegal form of criticism, the resolution of the case would depend
entirely on a judge's or court's arbitrary and subjective interpretation of the
offense. It may find for or against the plaintiff. The purpose of such a suit
would not be justice, but vengeance for having spoken one's mind, and to
exhaust the defendant's financial resources through attorney and court costs.
Several states have passed laws invalidating "libel tourism," that
is, suits brought against individuals in this country by Muslims in another country,
particularly in Britain.
Assault
and/or Battery: Criminal
or aggravated assault entails the
physical initiation of force against another individual, with or without a
weapon, with the intent to inflict bodily harm, compounded or not in the
commission of another crime, such as robbery, rape, or simply harassment or
intimidation. Battery is the
unsolicited contact of another person, such as "buttonholing" him,
jabbing a finger on his chest, grabbing his shirtsleeve, with no intent to
inflict bodily harm. It is usually construed as unlawful detention if the
victim did not wish to be "detained" by the aggressor and had no
recourse but to "get physical" with the perpetrator, if he so chose.
The notorious Rutgers case, which involved no physical contact at all between
the defendant and the "injured" but the use of a webcam, saw the
coining of another euphemism for "hate crime": bias intimidation.
Muslims and their
spokesmen repeatedly claim that Islam, Muslims, Mohammad, the Koran are under "assault" by
their critics and that their "defamation" constitutes nearly literal
physical assault, when in fact, all that can result from written, verbal or
visual criticism of Islam in any form is "emotional cruelty"
experienced by Muslims. But just as a man can ignore an insult and walk away,
Muslims are free to do the same thing.
Instead, practically
all criticism of Islam is regarded as "hurtful" and an "insult,"
and Muslims and their advocates continually seek "justice" or
restitution of or compensation for their lost "dignity" in courts.
All a Muslim need do is assert some form of (unprovable) anguish (or a
diminution of his mental and/or emotional well-being) as a result of the
"inhuman" treatment of legitimate criticism, and is regarded as a virtual physical assault. There are
irreconcilable differences between American law and Sharia, but Sharia, because
it is a "religious" code, is frequently countenanced as a legitimate moral
code that must not be amended or adulterated by secular law.
After all, secular
or man-made law is an abomination in Islam. See "Three Things You(Probably) Did Not Know About Islam" at minute 3:58 for an explanation of
this crucial facet of Islamic activism.
One would imagine,
and with ample justification, that the purpose of these suits is to "divorce"
Muslims from secular law, and to accord them "separate but equal"
status. But there can be no feasible "separate but equal"
relationship between a country's secular law and Sharia. One or the other must
sooner or later dominate. That is the inevitable nature of compromise. Any
compromise would be secular law's, not Islam's, for Islamic doctrine forbidscompromise. Islamists are working assiduously to ensure that Sharia dominates,
and if successful, they will with blaring trumpets and calls from the minarets
announce the end of freedom of speech and the reign of "freedom from
speech."
Libel
and Slander: These are two favorite terms employed by Islamist
supremacists when charging critics of Islam with "hate speech" or
"insensitivity." One might
"libel" or "defame" Islam, Mohammad, or Muslims by writing,
broadcasting, or otherwise publishing in words or in recordings statements or
images critical of Islam, Mohammad, or Muslims, yet "perceived" by
Islamic authorities or lawyers as malicious or false or defamatory in nature,
resulting in a loss of one of those overrated intangibles, "respect"
or "esteem" or "dignity."
One might "slander" them by verbally making "false"
or "malicious" statements. In both instances, the statements must be
addressed to persons other than the
subjects.
But the champions
of Islam hunt for offense and insult, and are perfidious eavesdroppers, as well.
They always manage to find something "hurtful."
Islam is alleged to
be an efficacious and powerful creed, yet it seems to be so sensitive to
criticism as to be an ideological hypochondriac, always complaining about
something. One expects it to succumb any day now. Mohammad, if he actually
existed, has been dead 1,400 years, and so is beyond libel or slander. In point of fact, his personal and private
life is a goldmine of supermarket tabloid gossip, much of it recorded telltale
in the Koran and Hadith, sordidly reminiscent of the private lives of the Kennedy
clan and Bill Clinton but far, far worse. The things revealed in Islamic
documents about this "role model" constitute a rap sheet of serious felonies
a mile long. He is a perfect subject to be ridiculed, mocked, or caricatured,
as much as Adolf Hitler and Mussolini, and Neville Chamberlain. Or Barack Obama.
Such a figure deserves contempt and hilarity, not "respect."
As for Muslims,
Mohammad is their icon and "prophet," and if they revere his alleged
"wisdom" (if not his image, for that is forbidden), neither are they
deserving of respect. You stay away from people whom you learn idolize Al Capone,
John Dillinger, and Bonnie and Clyde as paragons of virtue and goodness. You give
the cold shoulder to people whom you know idolize a mass murderer, mass rapist,
genocidal maniac, and slitter of throats and tongues and who threaten mayhem if
you take his name in vain.
"Hate crimes"
and "hate speech" are the weapons employed by Islamists and secular
statists to silence their critics. They are the shipworms of objective law,
burrowing randomly but determinedly through its timbers oblivious to the time when
the judicial structure of law, weakened by a maze of rotting tunnels and gaping
caverns, must someday collapse into anarchy and ultimately tyranny.
The champions of
"hate crime" and "hate speech" know this. This is why
freedom of speech must be upheld and defended with our utmost energy and
dedication. For our own self-preservation, we must oppose turning the First
Amendment into a felony offense.
