In one of our comment threads last night, latté island requested an open thread on a specific topic:
I’d also like to see a discussion about social issues such as women’s and gay rights, and how that relates to the counterjihad and Western renewal. Since Dymphna is busy writing something else, why don’t we have a topic without a whole essay, or a guest essay, or whatever. It’s long overdue. To save time, it could read something like: Women. Gays. The West. Discuss. We all have lots to say, we don’t have to wait for someone to write a whole essay.
You asked for it, you got it. Discuss.
I’ll just put in my own two cents before the food fight starts in earnest.
All the rights that women have or might want to have — or the rights held by anyone else, for that matter — do not trump the rights of the larger community. When any given personal right, if fully exercised by large numbers of people, threatens the existence of the community or the culture at large, then that right is forfeit.
It’s unfortunate, but true: your right to do X without restriction is worthless if the simultaneous practice of X by millions of people leads to the destruction of society. Then the barbarians — who summarily execute people who practice X — take over, and the whole question becomes moot.
In the case of women, such issues might include voting, abortion, contraception, etc. Many other practices have been added to the list of modern “rights”: the autonomy of children, sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, bestiality, satanism, you name it.
An argument over any given right would do well to examine whether the full implementation of that right would tend to destroy the culture that permits it.
OK, check all your weapons at the door, and then have at it.
The problem with your argument is that nobody ever knows where any particular “right” will lead. Therefore no “right” that is in any sense a change from the status quo would ever be permitted. Which is, basically, the core determining assumption of Islam and its most “regressive” , literally “conservative” elements, being those who seek to keep “society” (by which you mean a given culture) exactly as it was in the time of Muhammad. Even into details of dress and beard-dye.
In effect, your argument makes you essentially the same as proponents of the very Islam that I for one oppose so vehemently.
Baron Al Qadarwi?
Great idea!
Does the assumption of wanting to do X not depend on how many people might actually want to do X given the opportunity?
In a sense you could argue that homosexuality was wrong because if everyone was gay then there’d be no people – which is a fair point but at any one given time only about 2% of the population actually want to **** a member of the same sex anyway, and so having a permissible attitude towards it has very few consequences, if any.
I would say that some forms of feminism are far more destructive….
In the West the demands of the few ruin things for the many. The toxic ideas of the West are equality and fairness. Anybody who can get themselves portrayed as a victim can demand equality and fairness, no matter how destructive this is to society as a whole. A few women want men’s jobs, so they sue. Blacks demand jobs they don’t qualify for. Retarded and autistic children get huge educational resources that will do them no good.
Quote BB:
“your right to do X without restriction..”
In the other thread, the focal point was the right of women to cast their vote in a democracy. So “without” restriction would only mean that women would cast their vote, just like anyone else. Only problem is, that certain stats may show that on average women tend to vote more often for a candidate that the would be “restrictor” deems a threat to a greater collective, society, culture and so on. So the combination of unavoidable group membership and damning statistical evidence would decide in matters of natural rights?
Before you know it, we’ll be discussing stats and ways (not) to interpret them, with many of us here lacking in sufficient formal training to discern the pitfalls of statistical “evidence”.
Apart from that, there’s the moral question that entails issues like natural rights, the nature of freedom and the onerous practise of using political power on behalf of the greater good.
So I repeat my questions put forward in the other thread:
– Who will do the actual excluding, i.e. who will broach the news to women that in the general interest it would be better to abstain from voting?
– On behalf of what collective body would the exclusion be effected?
– How will this become law and of what kind of society exactly?
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
http://www.the-spearhead.com
http://roissy.wordpress.com
etc.
(warning, that second one contains NSFW discussions – but, in my experience, there is more truth to be found in its current and past articles than just about anywhere else on the net discussing men and women)
Women and men are not the same. Men build civilization. Women create the next generation. Neither one can do the other one’s task. Trying to pretend that society can still work while deliberately ignoring or discounting these basic facts leads to collapse. This is a major part of what is going on today.
Men build civilization because, and only because, they are doing it for children they know are theirs. They don’t do it out of charity. Without that knowledge, they’re fine drinking beer and playing video games all day. Women, all feminist indoctrination to the contrary, simply do not demonstrate the same level of focused innovation and energy that men do, that is required to create and maintain a civilization. Women are good at multitasking and social interaction and doing lots of little things. Which is exactly what you would expect from a specialization towards family matters.
Homosexuals _may_ serve some sort of organic purpose and not be just an error in the biological programming, but their presence always tends to be highly correlated with decadent and collapsing societies. They contribute little or nothing to the future of a society. Even if they do secure “rights”, those will be lost within a couple generations, because they’ll all be dead. They are at best parasitical on the broader society.
Such liberalism/libertarianism is based on the unspoken premise that only the present generation matters, who cares about the future, or if there even is one. No healthy society will tolerate such behavior: it is suicidal.
The basic functional unit of a society with a future is the patriarchal family.
Was my last post unacceptable for some reason, or is Blogger auto-deleting me?
“If everyone was gay then there’d be no people”.. Well, there sure wouldn’t be any procreation, from which it follows that homosexuality, as such, is morally superior to heterosexuality.
Consider how any ethical-moral system worthy of the name holds that it is wrong to needlessly inflict, or bring about, suffering. Since all who are born are destined to suffer to some, often a great, extent procreation is dead wrong.
But what of all the joyful experiences in life(?) you may ask. I’ll tell what.. None of them count when considering whether procreation is right or wrong as the unborn cannot be deprived of them as long as they remain unborn. Harm cannot be inflicted upon them either, but that surely is all for the better.
Of course, you need not be gay to make the ethically and morally sound choice of not putting children into this world. Leave it to the hypocrites (christian or atheist) and to the barbarians. Antinatalism is the way to go.
The earth is not our home. We came from nothing and to that condition our nostalgia should turn.
Maybe it was the links. Blogger sucks.
Anyway:
“So I repeat my questions put forward in the other thread:
– Who will do the actual excluding, i.e. who will broach the news to women that in the general interest it would be better to abstain from voting?
– On behalf of what collective body would the exclusion be effected?
– How will this become law and of what kind of society exactly?
“
Each individual male head of household. A functional society will be made up largely of families headed by men capable of leading their wives in such matters – whether by simply decreeing it by force, or convincing her, or of inspiring her to follow him out of respect and love, any will work. If she won’t obey him in this, she won’t obey him in much else either, and the family isn’t destined for the long term.
(And yes the word ‘obey’ will set off all sorts of feminist reflexes. When my grandmother was visiting, I took her somewhere in the car, we had a long talk about my parents, she was complaining about how my mother – her daughter – was so headstrong and didn’t listen to advice and bullheaded and on and on, and finally said “Well, at least she obeys your father.” Which is true, although I had never thought of it in those terms before.)
There is no need to create any “collective”. Each individual head of household who actually wants his family – and country – to last will arrange matters in this manner. Women who revolt against it will find themselves with much poorer-quality marriages and families. This is exactly what is happening right now, actually.
Law? Well, you change the requirements for suffrage to be: landowning man, married to a woman, with at least one child. Simple. Of course you need to get the law passed in the first place. That means that the people voting need to largely agree with it, which means that, probably, you are creating a new system among the ruins of the old. I don’t see a way to smoothly transition from the current political system into a no-female-suffrage one. It has to run down all the way first.
al-ttt —
Your extension of my argument is a reductio ad absurdum. Do you not think it is prudent to consider the larger consequences to society before granting a new “right” that has not been commonly accepted as such in the past?
I am a Burkean conservative with libertarian tendencies. This means that I want to live in liberty within a lawful society overseen by the smallest possible state. In such a polity I expect to enjoy the “ancient liberties” which were ours for centuries, first as Englishmen and then later as Americans.
These ancient liberties did not include many of the “rights” that are now being flung about willy-nilly by modern hedonistic culture.
Is there a reason for this?
Should we heed the wisdom built up over centuries by our ancestors?
Or should we just throw it all away?
Until very recently a man did not have the “right” to break a lifelong oath given during the sacrament of holy matrimony. There was a good reason for this, as we are now discovering. Divorce was made difficult and therefore rare because its prevention served the deepest needs of an ordered and prosperous society.
Divorce has been a relatively simple matter for the last forty-odd years, and the results are obvious, even if most people prefer not to discuss them. Easy divorce has been more destructive to Western culture than just about any other recent innovation. I don’t really need to list the consequences here, but they include female and child poverty, violent youth gangs, poor educational performance, child sexual abuse, and many other devastating results.
And did easy divorce make its practitioners happier and more fulfilled?
There is ample evidence to suggest that it did not. People may have had more sexual encounters with a greater number of partners, but there is no sign that this has increased the general level of happiness.
There was a good reason not to introduce this wonderful new right, which would purportedly grant the condition of self-fulfillment to those who practiced it. If anyone had cared to think it through, common sense would have argued against it.
The traditional and customary liberties of Western Civilization allowed it to reach its apotheosis. Most of the newfangled ones are the agents of its ongoing destruction. The evidence is there for all to see.
To follow up on my earlier comment, just a simple observation from Europe on the political situation in the US, at the national level.
– Republicrat cabal
– Both parties supporting welfare state govt. deeply involved in the looting business (illegal taxes, like income tax and so on; monetary inflation through progressive central banking, i.e. the FED)
– Both parties spreading PC MC propaganda, most notably the meme that “Islam is a Religion of Peace”
Given that we all know Islam (and its progressivist enablers) to be the biggest threat to Western civilization, my question would be:
In current (and past) elections, how could any person in the US, male or female, have cast a right vote?
Same goes for Holland before the advent of Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders. Today, we Dutchies at least have a voting chance to change things. In the foreseeable future and to my regret, I can see no PVV party in the US.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
In short i would say that the lies and refusal to stick to the turth have rendered us defenseless against more lies and dangers. This begning of lies has been greatl facilitated by the rise of homosexuality and feminsim. Both are lies fighting against reality and truth. The acceptance of these has led us ot where we are, confused and paralyzed with our truth detectors, like carbon monoxide detectors shut off or totally removed by political coercion.
I have seen a clear relation between the push of homosexuality and rise PCMC in my own time in order to protect it from criticism and rejection. This has also led way for others lies and dangers to follow, one being Islam.
Baron,
as you say, many so-called “rights” exist that were not considered rights in Burke’s time, and the contradictions inherent in these have only served to demean the entire concept of rights, to the extend that a Right is now little more than a selfish act that others are forced by law to tolerate.
“When any given personal right, if fully exercised by large numbers of people, threatens the existence of the community or the culture at large, then that right is forfeit.”
Correct in concept but not in expression. Properly phrased, it would be “When any _supposed_ personal right, if fully exercised by large numbers of people, threatens the existence of the community or the culture at large, then it isn’t really a right.”
Rights apply only against other people, and hence exist only in society; Robinson Crusoe had no prospective rights until somebody else showed up.
Rights, therefore, being inextricably an attribute of society, cannot without intellectual fatuity include any activity that would work to destabilize or dissolve that society. Such a “right” is self-destructive, because its exercise soon means that society goes away, and with it that “right”.
Quote:
In effect, your argument makes you essentially the same as proponents of the very Islam that I for one oppose so vehemently.
end quote.
You have stated my suspicion perfectly.
Individuals have rights.
Institutions do not.
Communities do not.
If anything, collective entities must be tightly controlled and circumscribed in everything they do.
Where crime is concerned, the minority, not the majority of individuals are engaged.
So what is this fear of the individual?
Islam is a problem unto itslef but our problem is lies and our remedy lies in uncovering the lies and telling the truth.
@ Nightmare ,concerning homosexuality, if you consider life not ot be worth living and procreation something wrong, you are a part of the lie because if that were the truth what prevents you from clinging to this life now?
As a matter of fact just as Islam has been observed to be parasitic as St. Augustine said of evil, so it is with homosexuality, it exists off of what you call heterosexuality but which is in actuality the only reality, found in female and male, nothng else. Male and female truly exist and supprot existence whcih you claim to despise, while homosexual unreality enters into existence only by virtue of male and female and has none unti itself. Perhaps a better name would be homounreality. How dare you insult reality and the truth and male and female with such deranged and nihilistic words. You demonstrate the spirit which militates against reality and inadvertantly helps our enemies.
goethechosemercy –
I’d like to second your suspicions. “Wrong voting” can only exert so much devastating influence because of the evermore encompassing welfare state, both in Europe and in the US.
On a further note, I’m afraid that it is in itself a sign of cultural decay when people start devising political systems that should be impervious to the free exercise of the natural rights by its own members.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Michael Servetus,
For everyone, whether they recognize it or not, it would have been better never to have been born. That is not just my opinion. It is the truth, as I believe I have demonstrated succinctly in my previous post. However, that is not to say that, having been born, the only right thing to do is kill oneself. I don’t know about you, but I certainly feel that I have certain obligations and responsibilities in relation to friends and family that are stuck here too. How’s that for nihilism?
As for your treasured ‘heteroreality’, never has there been anything as overrated.
In hoc signo vinces
Ultraliberal rights have been imposed on societies they have not been arrived at through a process of greater knowledge or spiritual empathy and human understanding that could be called moral evolution.
They are a political construct to advance a political agenda. Ultraliberal human rights the totalitarian moral code that will destroy us all majority and minority alike.
This is a very interesting discussion, and one in which I am not surprised to see that apparently only Baron has seized upon the kernel of human socio-moral dynamics, and which John Stuart Mill (whom, I suspect, Baron has familiarized himself with) summed up in “On Liberty”: “…That which produces the greatest utility to the majority is morally correct.”
In other words, I agree with Baron.
Although he identifies himself as a Burkean, there are a great many utilitarian aspects to Burkean philosophy. Morality, as a humanistic construct, can and should be defined as the mores and ethics which uniformly bind a society together for the common good (utility). Individual liberties – while important – mustn’t contravene overall welfare and social cohesion.
Nightmare: For everyone, whether they recognize it or not, it would have been better never to have been born.
The fact that you are still around to type such noisome and patently irrational claptrap clearly demonstrates that you lack the courage of your convictions.
Perhaps you are one of those well-heeled millionaires who thinks that our world would be so much better off if only all of the rabble would just politely excuse themselves from this mortal coil.
Claiming that whatever temporary sufferings in our existence thoroughly outweigh the beauty and joyous exhilaration of daily life constitutes ― not just a niggardly esteem for mankind but ― such a nihilistic degradation of the human spirit as to void even the least scintilla of moral authority which you so undeservedly seek to cloak yourself in.
By your dim lights, one may as well commit suicide in order to permanently preclude ever having to endure the agony of a splinter.
Eloquent.
Nightmare: As for your treasured ‘heteroreality’, never has there been anything as overrated.
Which you are clearly such ample proof of. Still, as is quite often the case with natural selection, most alternatives are far less appealing.
Isn’t it curious how the overwhelming majority of homosexuals who so detest every last thing about heterosexuality are, themselves, the product of heterosexual unions?
How sharper than the serpent’s tooth be the thankless child.
It is precisely this sort of penultimate ingratitude that has obliged me to recalibrate my support for gay rights. Radical homosexuality’s declaration of war upon the nuclear family has essentially voided their collective civil rights. How to fairly implement that notion in a free and open society still escapes me but not in the voting booth.
No better example of the snide and denigrating attitude displayed by so many radical homosexuals could have been hoped for in this discussion. It would be impossible for me to script a more useful demonstration of why I have been obliged to personally reassess my entire position on gay rights.
Gays had best take heed of the old maxim:
Just because you have the right to do something does make it the right thing to do.
Launching a full scale assault on the nuclear family in a largely heterosexual society seems to fit rather well with that admonition.
EJGB —
Morality, as a humanistic construct, can and should be defined as the mores and ethics which uniformly bind a society together for the common good (utility). Individual liberties – while important – mustn’t contravene overall welfare and social cohesion.
Yes, I agree. And it’s worth noting that one may come to the same conclusion via the pathway of strict Darwinism. The logic would run something like this: A society will not survive if it confers rights upon its members which tend to bring about the destruction of the society itself. It will be replaced by a society which does not possess the same fatal flaw.
Although I am a believer in God, I’ve noticed that many useful moral conclusions may be reached entirely through an atheistic calculus, provided that one is willing to remain rigorously logical.
But not all moral conclusions. An atheist can find no logical or Darwinian case against genocide, since the extermination of a competing set of alien genes confers a selective advantage on the genotype of one’s own group.
Many of the most self-righteous moral stands taken by today’s militant secularists and atheists cannot be supported without recourse to a moral philosophy that relies on the existence of a supernatural order. It’s unfortunate, but true.
WRONG! Individual rights always are the most important issue. NOTHING supersedes the rights of the individual. Rights discuss what action of force is justified when two moral agents come into conflict. If I can perform action X and action X aggresses against nobody then I have a right to perform action X, PERIOD. “Society” has no rights since it is not a moral agent. Also rights are not cumulative. 10 people do not have 10 times more rights than one person.
If I am performing action X and I am not aggressing against another then I have a right to perform action X AND since its non-aggression rthewre can be no claim this action is “harming” society… again disproving any notion that a persons’ rights somehow must be limited.
And maybe you need to question if some society NEEDS to destroy liberty for its survival then its not worth surviving. You might want to view Van Jone’s speech on the need to destroy liberty to create equality… you sound just like him.
Hugh —
And maybe you need to question if some society NEEDS to destroy liberty for its survival then its not worth surviving.
That, of course, is a matter of personal taste. But reality teaches us that an “ordered liberty” is necessary, or there will be no liberty at all. Completely unfettered liberty — also known as “anarchism” — eventually destroys the liberty of everyone except the strongest bully, who ends up ruling everybody else.
Yours is a rather Manichaean worldview. I accept the existence of intermediate conditions between absolute liberty and absolute authority. There are more choices for us than complete Hedonism and fundamentalist Islam. It’s not an either-or situation.
Zenster,
Did you say ‘irrational’?
In that post of yours you clearly do not engage rationally with any point of my argument in either of my two previous posts. All you are offering up is thinly veiled abuse. Your eloquence doesn’t fool me. And as I’m sure you are intelligent enough to understand it – the truth sometimes being simple – I can see your off the mark verbiage as nothing other than an act of denial. But no worries, I’ve seen too much of that in my day to be bothered much by it any longer. I suppose it is a natural reaction to a moral truth of such consequences. For those interested in seeing these matters more clearly I’d recommend South African philosopher David Benatar’s book ‘Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence’. Have a nice one!
Hugh –
I would respectfully disagree with you on several points:
1. Society is, in fact, a moral agent. The very nature and purpose of a society, ANY society – large or small, is to form a structure and collective of like-minded individuals oriented toward advancing the common welfare and ideology of the body politic. This is demonstrated throughout not only the history of humankind, but also the animal kingdom.
2. Your statement “If I can perform action X and action X aggresses against nobody…” directly contradicts the notion of individual rights, since – if action X inflicts no contravention on the body politic – no societal mores have been compromised.
3. Individual liberties can, and often do, become cumulative. As a group attains a certain liberty or set of liberties, the natural human tendency is to desire more liberties.
As a group, this manifests itself on an exponential scale as each individual’s desires become part of the whole.
4. With regard to your last assertion that a society willing to sacrifice personal liberties on any scale is not fit to survive, i would counter with a quote from Benjamin Franklin:
“[Any] society which trades liberty for security deserves neither.”
Make that “in those posts of yours..”
youtube.com/watch?v=SvZ9SldqdIE
Natural rights are “transcendent”. They are not dependent on gender or whatever category, susceptible of statistical damnation.
Natural rights are also “unalienable”, which means that even the individual can’t do anything to deem them forfeit. And others most certainly can’t. We cannot give up our rights, even by free will, and no man-made government – still in the shadows or not – can ever take them away.
Not to respect this, is to relinquish one very important premise of true Western civilization, which i.m.h.o. is based on the concept of Natural Law, not on progressivist so-called “Human Rights”, or utilitarian political philosophies, like those of Mill, that run the risk of handing ammo to “Social Contract” progressives.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
My point is this, and again I agree with Baron:
There is and must be a middle ground, yes. It isn’t and can’t be an either/or equation, lest you place the society in danger of EITHER a tyranny OR an anarchy – which inevitably leads to tyranny (since nature abhors a void).
Your suppositions, Hugh – while admirable after a fashion – are, I daresay, rather altruistic.
As I said before it seems reasonably clear to me that whatever mental distortions and contortions make it mentally palatable for homounreality to be tolerated and put in a protected class are the same constructs and memes that facilitate the abuse of our system and render us paralyzed in the face of other threats. For to allow that one to pass we had to go beyond the concepts of liberty and actually commit a form of wilful mental suicide and habituate ourselves to ignoring the voice of reason. Once you swallow that one nothing is too big or nasty or threatening to swallow.
“Many of the most self-righteous moral stands taken by today’s militant secularists and atheists cannot be supported without recourse to a moral philosophy that relies on the existence of a supernatural order. “
As an atheist myself, I have to quibble with this. Specifically, I dispute the claim that morality is supernatural. My best guess on the topic (and that’s all this is, so take it with however much salt you want) is that it is an emergent property of the interactions of thinking creatures, the same way gravity is an emergent property of the existence of mass particles. The more complex the possible mental computations, the stronger the potential moral force – with the caveat that it is an extremely _weak_ force in the short term, much like gravity when compared to electromagnetism over short distances. It is only in the general long-term pattern of events that the general trend becomes clearer, and even then other events – of a purely physical nature, such as earthquakes or avalanches – can interrupt it.
Rats and parrots and cats and dogs and lots of other animals all have displayed a clear understanding of fairness and justice, both in the laboratory and in interactions with anyone who has lived with them. They didn’t learn that from an arbitrary standard handed down at their animal church: it’s something close to instinct. It’s a part of the fabric of reality. You can say that God wove morality into the universe he made, or that it is an accidental but interesting emergent property in the same way that the fine-structure constant is, with the anthropic principle dictating why it happens to be the one we happen to observe – but to call it “supernatural” is, I think, entirely wrong.
Also, regarding this
“That, of course, is a matter of personal taste. But reality teaches us that an “ordered liberty” is necessary, or there will be no liberty at all. Completely unfettered liberty — also known as “anarchism” — eventually destroys the liberty of everyone except the strongest bully, who ends up ruling everybody else.”
Moldbug always digs up the best quotes:
“And truly I desire their Liberty and Freedom as much as anybody whomsoever. But I must tell you, that their Liberty and Freedom, consists in having of Government, those Laws, by which their Life and their Goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.”
– Charles I of England
Nightmare: Your eloquence doesn’t fool me.
Nor did I mean it to.
Your mentality reeks of a “malevolent universe” mindset. If there is one thing that is perfectly clear, this universe is life oriented and quite benevolent. Were it not so, we would not even be alive.
That you deem it better for people not to exist at all reveals a deep seated hatred for mankind that is as basely hypocritical as it is noxious. Your sweeping dismissal of millennia worth of human achievement defies all reason. Yours is an acrid pessimism that flies in the face of beauty, grace and harmony.
While the meaning of life has somehow escaped your myopic perception that does not mean others should heed what is so obviously an impaired sense of appreciation for the miracle that is human spirituality.
Your ability to disregard the clear and profound message that each moment of life makes available to those who are even marginally cognizant is stark testimony to a deep and abiding hatred of love and life in general.
No trained professional is capable of rescuing you from yourself. The way in which you violently reject any exuberant celebration of life betrays a malaise of the soul whose lassitude voluntarily bars you from communing with all that gives ultimate meaning to human existence.
I have no pity to waste upon such obstinate ingratitude.
Zenster thinks this, Zenster thinks that; none of which has the least bit to do with any real cognizance of the moral fact I was so ungrateful to point out. I rest my case.
Rollory, glad you linked to The Spearhead and Roissy. They’ve been essential reading to me for years, and I recommend The Spearhead especially.
I would have linked to them if nobody else did, because when it comes to the fallout from feminism and other leftarded policies, they have excellent articles and commentary.
Cheers,
A further side note to the role of John Stuart Mill, is that i.m.o. he has been a disastrous boost to statism, especially in his views on economic policies. And I am very weary of using this flip-flopping social philosopher as a guide for policy recommendations about rights for individual citizens. His justification of the state using its power (in the general interest of course) in order to prohibit marriage for people deemed unfit to support a family is a particularly ominous example of a progressive social engineering mentality. Some of his recommendations to control population growth go straight back to Malthus, champion of arch-progressive interventionists of all ages.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
About John Stuart Mill, he lived and wrote in an age when the idea of the sacred was being abandoned in favor of, what was thought to be scientific principles applied to government. It is the attempt to live without God or the idea of a judge or judgement with unchanging ways.
It has been argued that we can find the same principles as are revealed in sacred Scripture by reason alone and that was believed by many at first whose reason and presuppositional starting point and conduits had been saturated by common Christian-Mosaic sentiments. In this scenario readiness acting ascopt cat not original authority but rather inspired to find rationalizations for accepted mores. The proof that reason alone cannot stand on it’s own two feet is the ways in which we see reason being used today to support contrary and opposing principles to those it was associated with before. I would then have to agree eighths Baron more or less in that reason is limited and liberty unfettered is self opposing.
Oh, well if it’s population control you wish to discuss, I am personally in favor of Jonathan Swift’s ideas regarding that issue.
Brilliant man, that Swift. I’m proud to be his fellow countryman!
EJGB – Society is NOT a moral agent since it cannot reason. It is nothing. Only individuals reason.
2.No my statement confirms the definition of rights since rights are not handed out by any politics nor by the state. If my action does not aggress then I have the right to perform the action. I do not need permission from anyone else.
3.And so what. As long as that desire does not impose force upon another it causes no harm. You cannot aggress against someone UNLESS you aggress against them. If I perform no action that is force upon you then I have not used force upon you.
4. Your quote is irrelevant. Franklin clearly proves MY point that if one trades liberty for security they accomplish neither. The point of the article was that liberty must be controlled “traded”. Franklin merely supports my position.
Baron Bodissey – an “ordered liberty” is unnecessary and undesirable for the very reason that any “order” applied would be arbitrary and the special interest of a few. WHO’S ORDER? All liberty must be expanded since liberty is based on non-coercion. Me expanding my liberty does NOT aggress against you and so you are not harmed. Therefore I have a right to expand liberty.
Liberty is NOT hedonism. That is a horrible comparison. Liberty is merely the removal of arbitrary obstacles to the pursuit of freedom and happiness. Expansion of the mind. Growth of the spirit. Hedonism is neither of these things. In fact the only true purpose a rational being could have is pursuit of happiness.
How does my expansion of liberty aggress against you? Unless I am forcing you to support me in some coercive manner I do not harm you in my liberty expansion.
Sohns und Dottirs –
My 9mm is checked.If we are discussing the value of Female HUu.man Beings in Islam -Sorry Girls, you rank under Goats. ISLAM would have it NO OTHER WAY. Violated Goats can be sold in a neighboring village according to the Qua’ran. Violated Human Females under ISLAM – Not So Lucky. That is all.
Dr. Shalit
Sagunto – I agree about Mill. On the one hand he writes supporting utilitarian thinking and on the other states the pursuit of happiness is the only goal a person can have. “How can one plan a society without necessarily imposing one view upon everyone else?” which is one of his paraphrased quotes yet he indulges the greatest good for the greatest number and is routinely referenced by progressives for utilitarian excuses to weild power.
Hugh –
We are indeed in agreement in our opposition to the collectivist spirit that sometimes pervades the still inchoate counterjih.. ehm, no wait, now I’m stealing someones favourite line. Shouldn’t do that 😉
But anyway, at first I was rather disappointed to see this John Mill championed as some kind of founding father of “social cohesion” (a favourite term among progressives).
On second thought, I think it is good to have his name mentioned, especially in a topic that relates to the survival of Western values, culture and liberty. For if one seeks to understand one of the great puzzles of the 19th/20th century, i.e. the shift of (classical) liberalism from adhering to limited govt. and laissez faire, towards the progressive and expansionist inflation of government, meddling with social life, Mill is mandatory reading, for he has been instrumental in destroying the Anglo-American tradition by infusing it with radical French progressivism. Two inherently opposing traditions blended into the highly contradictory doctrine of “modern Liberalism”, seeking to boost individual liberty through the collectivist apparatus of centralized government.
The key here is his so-called “Religion of Mankind” he was so zealous about, with its resounding echoes of the deeply anti-Christian Jacobin sentiment. Voegelin has described this line of reasoning and radical rejection of transcendent religion as the “progressive immanentization of existence”.
Embracing Mill (for the radical progressivist notion of the “common good” or “social cohesion”) is to embrace a pivotal figure in the ultimate destruction of true liberty (and religion). If you want to study a highly successful founding father of the political religion of progressivism, John Stuart Mill is your man.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Nightmare: Zenster thinks this, Zenster thinks that; none of which has the least bit to do with any real cognizance of the moral fact I was so ungrateful to point out.
Couching your suggestion that the entire human race voluntarily go extinct in the same sentence with the word “moral” so perverts every concept of morality as to negate any possibility of productive exchange. Referring to it as “fact” is merely icing on your thoroughly poisoned cake.
Your screen name amply suggests the sort of world you inhabit. It is yours for the keeping. Enjoy it.
Hugh, in society we musty have a amount of consideration and respect for others feelings and beliefs, if we offend inordinately we must also be prepared to defend by strength of arms our liberty against their perceived liberty to be free of your offence .This then enters into the realm of ideological aggression and it seems you have only considered physical.
Hugh –
First, it’s “whose order”. As for whose – that defined by nature. Human society is subject to rules and laws the same way physical behavior is, it is not arbitrary. Find what order best complies with human nature, or indeed the nature of the people for whom you want to create a society (because not all may be the same), and that is the order to follow. American style libertinism, for example, would be neither suitable nor accepted in Japan. Japan’s society might stand for some improvement, but to say that there is no defined order whatsoever behind it – or indeed behind traditional American, or European society – is a plain lie.
“How does my expansion of liberty aggress against you?”
When you are part of the same society I live in, and establish the precedent or rule that it is acceptable to behave in ways that lessen the cohesion and viability of that society, then you are hurting me – if I value my existence within the context of that society.
What we have here is a basic disagreement on definitions and responsibilities. No man is an island, vs all humans being strictly independent. I claim strict independence is untrue and impossible.
Now, if you want to go establish your pure libertarian society somewhere apart from mine, fine, go to it. However you can not decree that all the people around you, who wish to be part of a non-pure-libertarian society, must then modify their behavior to suit you.
Baron says:
“Your extension of my argument is a reductio ad absurdum. Do you not think it is prudent to consider the larger consequences to society before granting a new “right” that has not been commonly accepted as such in the past?”
The very definition of a “right” renders it distinct from the self-interest of any party. Essentially, your position is that the interest of one arbitrarily chosen party (your “society” as opposed to, for instance, Muslim “society”) trumps any other consideration.
Indeed, your statement (quoted above) in effect validates my equation between your position and that of Islamic purists who insist that no change that has ever occurred (“rights” or otherwise) since Muhammad are ever valid. Applying your argument we find that there is no longer any grounds for criticising Islam. So, if they believe in murdering Jews and non-believers, as long as they can show that to grant the “right” of life to Jews and Non-believers would be as you put it: “…granting a new “right” that has not been commonly accepted as such in the past?”…then by your criterion their continued murder of Jews and non-believers is not only insusceptible to criticism but is, by your yard-stick, the only morally right thing to do.
Now, dont get me wrong, I take the position that “morality”,”rights” etc are terms that refer to nothing that actually exists in the real world. They are purely expressions of culture. Your “moral” is another persons “immoral”. I adamantly the existence of “right” or “wrong”, in the absence of religious dictate, other than in relation to what is best for myself and my own in the long run. Irrespective of its effect upon strangers or the unborn. The position I take is that self-interest DOES indeed trump all other considerations. My individual self-interest necessarily encompasses that of my family, friends, community and state or tribe. My objection to your position is not with the arbitrary proritisation of the value of one culture or group (or “society” as you put it) that is at its core, but the fact that, for one thing, you seem naiive to this BEING the core of your position and for another, that my “tribe” and self-interest certainly appears to be different to yours.
If we agree that perpetuation of ones preferred “society” trumps all other considerations (your basic premise) then I am duty bound to oppose both Islam, and YOUR “society”, which your choice of examples implies to be very narrow, parochial and rooted in a lack of knowledge or experience of a wider world. My “community” patently appears to me to encompass a vast number of realities that your world denies. It is therefore, in your choice, fatally opposed to your “society” every bit as much as it is to Islam.
Ultimately,you have to accept that you have to make a choice. Is your opposition to Islam more or less important than your sqaemishness about aspects of non-Muslim “society”. Are you willing to let Islam triumph out of a dislike of some aspects of non-Muslim culture. Do you in fact have more in common with Muslims than non-Muslims?
Other than this, arguing about “rights” and which are or are not “valid” is pure sophistry apt only for sophomores.
Baron says:
“Your extension of my argument is a reductio ad absurdum. Do you not think it is prudent to consider the larger consequences to society before granting a new “right” that has not been commonly accepted as such in the past?”
The very definition of a “right” renders it distinct from the self-interest of any party. Essentially, your position is that the interest of one arbitrarily chosen party (your “society” as opposed to, for instance, Muslim “society”) trumps any other consideration.
Indeed, your statement (quoted above) in effect validates my equation between your position and that of Islamic purists who insist that no change that has ever occurred (“rights” or otherwise) since Muhammad are ever valid. Applying your argument we find that there is no longer any grounds for criticising Islam. So, if they believe in murdering Jews and non-believers, as long as they can show that to grant the “right” of life to Jews and Non-believers would be as you put it: “…granting a new “right” that has not been commonly accepted as such in the past?”…then by your criterion their continued murder of Jews and non-believers is not only insusceptible to criticism but is, by your yard-stick, the only morally right thing to do.
Now, dont get me wrong, I take the position that “morality”,”rights” etc are terms that refer to nothing that actually exists in the real world. They are purely expressions of culture. Your “moral” is another persons “immoral”. I adamantly the existence of “right” or “wrong”, in the absence of religious dictate, other than in relation to what is best for myself and my own in the long run. Irrespective of its effect upon strangers or the unborn. The position I take is that self-interest DOES indeed trump all other considerations. My individual self-interest necessarily encompasses that of my family, friends, community and state or tribe. My objection to your position is not with the arbitrary proritisation of the value of one culture or group (or “society” as you put it) that is at its core, but the fact that, for one thing, you seem naiive to this BEING the core of your position and for another, that my “tribe” and self-interest certainly appears to be different to yours.
If we agree that perpetuation of ones preferred “society” trumps all other considerations (your basic premise) then I am duty bound to oppose both Islam, and YOUR “society”, which your choice of examples implies to be very narrow, parochial and rooted in a lack of knowledge or experience of a wider world. My “community” patently appears to me to encompass a vast number of realities that your world denies. It is therefore, in your choice, fatally opposed to your “society” every bit as much as it is to Islam.
Ultimately,you have to accept that you have to make a choice. Is your opposition to Islam more or less important than your sqaemishness about aspects of non-Muslim “society”. Are you willing to let Islam triumph out of a dislike of some aspects of non-Muslim culture. Do you in fact have more in common with Muslims than non-Muslims?
Other than this, arguing about “rights” and which are or are not “valid” is pure sophistry apt only for sophomores.
Furthermore, I would like to point out that blocking comments frompeople who disagree with you has to be the cheapest low shot of any pseudo-intellectual “debating” style.
We have already seen on this blog your facile defence of deleting comments that it is not “censorship” because it is always possible to post the same comments elsewhere. Which is like saying that if Blogger deletes / blocks your account and closes your site because a reader complains that it is in some way objectionable (which can happen all so easily) that’s simply fine because there are plenty of other blog providers where you can go run a blog instead!
Its a highly disingenuous argument. Moreover, when you open up a debate as you have here and accept comments on the basis that you can of course present your counter-argument, to then arbitrarily block your interlocutors response to your counter-argument is an act of both cowardice and traduction. Cowardice because it exposes you as having no confidence in your capacity to argue in any depth. Traduction, because it skews debate to misrepresent the other party as not having a counter-argument, which they may have been blocked from posting.
You like to deploy brow-beating assertions of a quasi-philosophical mien (“reductio ad absurdum” indeed) but clearly lack any confidence in your ability to handle ideas in any depth beyond these paddling-pool clichés of pseudo-intellectual posturing. So you bar reply comments from anyone who appears liable to plumb that shallowness. This is cheap. I have seen it a few times here. I wonder if this comment will also disappear?
Rollory: … I dispute the claim that morality is supernatural. My best guess on the topic … is that it is an emergent property of the interactions of thinking creatures, the same way gravity is an emergent property of the existence of mass particles.
R. Buckminster Fuller once said:
“The flow of energy through a system tends to organize that system”
I would argue that life has similar self-organizational properties which become “emergent” once a certain threshold of community size and average intelligence ― not necessarily sentience, mind you ― is reached.
While in the Philippines, I had this exact same discussion with my dear friend Father Rex Alarcon. He was taken aback to find that ― as an agnostic ― I maintained, nonetheless, how there is only one option and that is the path of moral conduct.
Immorality is not life-giving and, just as often, operates against life. Logic, and reason both point towards the superiority of cohesive behavior of which immorality is not a part.
Baron Bodissey: A society will not survive if it confers rights upon its members which tend to bring about the destruction of the society itself. It will be replaced by a society which does not possess the same fatal flaw.
The philosopher, Ayn Rand, summed this up rather tidily in her observations “about the relationship of principles to goals”:
“1. In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.”
Similarly, if a society “confers rights upon its members which tend to bring about the destruction of the society itself”, it is internally inconsistent and “will be replaced by a society which does not possess the same fatal flaw”.
PC MC protection of Islam and lack of outcry by feminists regarding the misogyny of shari’a law are both premium examples of near-fatal inconsistency which must be addressed in order that Western civilization may survive.
This is especially so in the case of women. Their largely irrational and deafening silence over Islam’s institutionalized policy of Abject Gender Apartheid is such a profound inconsistency that the rights of women justifiably could be abrogated in the name of preserving the greater whole.
Recent “interfaith alliances” between European Jews and Muslims that seek to prevent any proscription of Islam in the name of preserving “religious freedoms” is another example of a large group posing a threat through active facilitation of a far more dire one.
Be it through passivity or direct action both women and Jews are providing the world with excellent reasons to view them adversely.
This comment has been removed by the author.
Furthermore, I would like to point out that blocking comments frompeople who disagree with you has to be the cheapest low shot of any pseudo-intellectual “debating” style.
We have already seen on this blog your facile defence of deleting comments that it is not “censorship” because it is always possible to post the same comments elsewhere. Which is like saying that if Blogger deletes / blocks your account and closes your site because a reader complains that it is in some way objectionable (which can happen all so easily) that’s simply fine because there are plenty of other blog providers where you can go run a blog instead!
Its a highly disingenuous argument. Moreover, when you open up a debate as you have here and accept comments on the basis that you can of course present your counter-argument, to then arbitrarily block your interlocutors response to your counter-argument is an act of both cowardice and traduction. Cowardice because it exposes you as having no confidence in your capacity to argue in any depth. Traduction, because it skews debate to misrepresent the other party as not having a counter-argument, which they may have been blocked from posting.
You like to deploy brow-beating assertions of a quasi-philosophical mien (“reductio ad absurdum” indeed) but clearly lack any confidence in your ability to handle ideas in any depth beyond these paddling-pool clichés of pseudo-intellectual posturing. So you bar reply comments from anyone who appears liable to plumb that shallowness. This is cheap. I have seen it a few times here. I wonder if this comment will also disappear?
Furthermore, I would like to point out that blocking comments frompeople who disagree with you has to be the cheapest low shot of any pseudo-intellectual “debating” style.
We have already seen on this blog your facile defence of deleting comments that it is not “censorship” because it is always possible to post the same comments elsewhere. Which is like saying that if Blogger deletes / blocks your account and closes your site because a reader complains that it is in some way objectionable (which can happen all so easily) that’s simply fine because there are plenty of other blog providers where you can go run a blog instead!
Its a highly disingenuous argument. Moreover, when you open up a debate as you have here and accept comments on the basis that you can of course present your counter-argument, to then arbitrarily block your interlocutors response to your counter-argument is an act of both cowardice and traduction. Cowardice because it exposes you as having no confidence in your capacity to argue in any depth. Traduction, because it skews debate to misrepresent the other party as not having a counter-argument, which they may have been blocked from posting.
You like to deploy brow-beating assertions of a quasi-philosophical mien (“reductio ad absurdum” indeed) but clearly lack any confidence in your ability to handle ideas in any depth beyond these paddling-pool clichés of pseudo-intellectual posturing. So you bar reply comments from anyone who appears liable to plumb that shallowness. This is cheap. I have seen it a few times here. I wonder if this comment will also disappear?
Furthermore, I would like to point out that blocking comments frompeople who disagree with you has to be the cheapest low shot of any pseudo-intellectual “debating” style.
We have already seen on this blog your facile defence of deleting comments that it is not “censorship” because it is always possible to post the same comments elsewhere. Which is like saying that if Blogger deletes / blocks your account and closes your site because a reader complains that it is in some way objectionable (which can happen all so easily) that’s simply fine because there are plenty of other blog providers where you can go run a blog instead!
Its a highly disingenuous argument. Moreover, when you open up a debate as you have here and accept comments on the basis that you can of course present your counter-argument, to then arbitrarily block your interlocutors response to your counter-argument is an act of both cowardice and traduction. Cowardice because it exposes you as having no confidence in your capacity to argue in any depth. Traduction, because it skews debate to misrepresent the other party as not having a counter-argument, which they may have been blocked from posting.
You like to deploy brow-beating assertions of a quasi-philosophical mien (“reductio ad absurdum” indeed) but clearly lack any confidence in your ability to handle ideas in any depth beyond these paddling-pool clichés of pseudo-intellectual posturing. So you bar reply comments from anyone who appears liable to plumb that shallowness. This is cheap. I have seen it a few times here. I wonder if this comment will also disappear?
Furthermore, I would like to point out that blocking comments frompeople who disagree with you has to be the cheapest low shot of any pseudo-intellectual “debating” style.
We have already seen on this blog your facile defence of deleting comments that it is not “censorship” because it is always possible to post the same comments elsewhere. Which is like saying that if Blogger deletes / blocks your account and closes your site because a reader complains that it is in some way objectionable (which can happen all so easily) that’s simply fine because there are plenty of other blog providers where you can go run a blog instead!
Its a highly disingenuous argument. Moreover, when you open up a debate as you have here and accept comments on the basis that you can of course present your counter-argument, to then arbitrarily block your interlocutors response to your counter-argument is an act of both cowardice and traduction. Cowardice because it exposes you as having no confidence in your capacity to argue in any depth. Traduction, because it skews debate to misrepresent the other party as not having a counter-argument, which they may have been blocked from posting.
You like to deploy brow-beating assertions of a quasi-philosophical mien (“reductio ad absurdum” indeed) but clearly lack any confidence in your ability to handle ideas in any depth beyond these paddling-pool clichés of pseudo-intellectual posturing. So you bar reply comments from anyone who appears liable to plumb that shallowness. This is cheap. I have seen it a few times here. I wonder if this comment will also disappear?
Furthermore, I would like to point out that blocking comments frompeople who disagree with you has to be the cheapest low shot of any pseudo-intellectual “debating” style.
We have already seen on this blog your facile defence of deleting comments that it is not “censorship” because it is always possible to post the same comments elsewhere. Which is like saying that if Blogger deletes / blocks your account and closes your site because a reader complains that it is in some way objectionable (which can happen all so easily) that’s simply fine because there are plenty of other blog providers where you can go run a blog instead!
Its a highly disingenuous argument. Moreover, when you open up a debate as you have here and accept comments on the basis that you can of course present your counter-argument, to then arbitrarily block your interlocutors response to your counter-argument is an act of both cowardice and traduction. Cowardice because it exposes you as having no confidence in your capacity to argue in any depth. Traduction, because it skews debate to misrepresent the other party as not having a counter-argument, which they may have been blocked from posting.
You like to deploy brow-beating assertions of a quasi-philosophical mien (“reductio ad absurdum” indeed) but clearly lack any confidence in your ability to handle ideas in any depth beyond these paddling-pool clichés of pseudo-intellectual posturing. So you bar reply comments from anyone who appears liable to plumb that shallowness. This is cheap. I have seen it a few times here. I wonder if this comment will also disappear?
Furthermore, I would like to point out that blocking comments frompeople who disagree with you has to be the cheapest low shot of any pseudo-intellectual “debating” style.
We have already seen on this blog your facile defence of deleting comments that it is not “censorship” because it is always possible to post the same comments elsewhere. Which is like saying that if Blogger deletes / blocks your account and closes your site because a reader complains that it is in some way objectionable (which can happen all so easily) that’s simply fine because there are plenty of other blog providers where you can go run a blog instead!
Its a highly disingenuous argument. Moreover, when you open up a debate as you have here and accept comments on the basis that you can of course present your counter-argument, to then arbitrarily block your interlocutors response to your counter-argument is an act of both cowardice and traduction. Cowardice because it exposes you as having no confidence in your capacity to argue in any depth. Traduction, because it skews debate to misrepresent the other party as not having a counter-argument, which they may have been blocked from posting.
You like to deploy brow-beating assertions of a quasi-philosophical mien (“reductio ad absurdum” indeed) but clearly lack any confidence in your ability to handle ideas in any depth beyond these paddling-pool clichés of pseudo-intellectual posturing. So you bar reply comments from anyone who appears liable to plumb that shallowness. This is cheap. I have seen it a few times here. I wonder if this comment will also disappear?
Furthermore, I would like to point out that blocking comments frompeople who disagree with you has to be the cheapest low shot of any pseudo-intellectual “debating” style.
We have already seen on this blog your facile defence of deleting comments that it is not “censorship” because it is always possible to post the same comments elsewhere. Which is like saying that if Blogger deletes / blocks your account and closes your site because a reader complains that it is in some way objectionable (which can happen all so easily) that’s simply fine because there are plenty of other blog providers where you can go run a blog instead!
Its a highly disingenuous argument. Moreover, when you open up a debate as you have here and accept comments on the basis that you can of course present your counter-argument, to then arbitrarily block your interlocutors response to your counter-argument is an act of both cowardice and traduction. Cowardice because it exposes you as having no confidence in your capacity to argue in any depth. Traduction, because it skews debate to misrepresent the other party as not having a counter-argument, which they may have been blocked from posting.
You like to deploy brow-beating assertions of a quasi-philosophical mien (“reductio ad absurdum” indeed) but clearly lack any confidence in your ability to handle ideas in any depth beyond these paddling-pool clichés of pseudo-intellectual posturing. So you bar reply comments from anyone who appears liable to plumb that shallowness. This is cheap. I have seen it a few times here. I wonder if this comment will also disappear?
Furthermore, I would like to point out that blocking comments frompeople who disagree with you has to be the cheapest low shot of any pseudo-intellectual “debating” style.
We have already seen on this blog your facile defence of deleting comments that it is not “censorship” because it is always possible to post the same comments elsewhere. Which is like saying that if Blogger deletes / blocks your account and closes your site because a reader complains that it is in some way objectionable (which can happen all so easily) that’s simply fine because there are plenty of other blog providers where you can go run a blog instead!
Its a highly disingenuous argument. Moreover, when you open up a debate as you have here and accept comments on the basis that you can of course present your counter-argument, to then arbitrarily block your interlocutors response to your counter-argument is an act of both cowardice and traduction. Cowardice because it exposes you as having no confidence in your capacity to argue in any depth. Traduction, because it skews debate to misrepresent the other party as not having a counter-argument, which they may have been blocked from posting.
You like to deploy brow-beating assertions of a quasi-philosophical mien (“reductio ad absurdum” indeed) but clearly lack any confidence in your ability to handle ideas in any depth beyond these paddling-pool clichés of pseudo-intellectual posturing. So you bar reply comments from anyone who appears liable to plumb that shallowness. This is cheap. I have seen it a few times here. I wonder if this comment will also disappear?
Furthermore, I would like to point out that blocking comments frompeople who disagree with you has to be the cheapest low shot of any pseudo-intellectual “debating” style.
We have already seen on this blog your facile defence of deleting comments that it is not “censorship” because it is always possible to post the same comments elsewhere. Which is like saying that if Blogger deletes / blocks your account and closes your site because a reader complains that it is in some way objectionable (which can happen all so easily) that’s simply fine because there are plenty of other blog providers where you can go run a blog instead!
Its a highly disingenuous argument. Moreover, when you open up a debate as you have here and accept comments on the basis that you can of course present your counter-argument, to then arbitrarily block your interlocutors response to your counter-argument is an act of both cowardice and traduction. Cowardice because it exposes you as having no confidence in your capacity to argue in any depth. Traduction, because it skews debate to misrepresent the other party as not having a counter-argument, which they may have been blocked from posting.
You like to deploy brow-beating assertions of a quasi-philosophical mien (“reductio ad absurdum” indeed) but clearly lack any confidence in your ability to handle ideas in any depth beyond these paddling-pool clichés of pseudo-intellectual posturing. So you bar reply comments from anyone who appears liable to plumb that shallowness. This is cheap. I have seen it a few times here. I wonder if this comment will also disappear?
smorgasborg —
I did not “block” any of your comments.
I made the mistake of leaving my computer desk to go and eat dinner, and while I was gone, your 15 comments (many of them evidently repeats) were blocked by Blogger’s stupid spam filter. As soon as I saw them in the cache, I released them.
Now I must go through them and see if they violate any of our rules. If they do, then I will delete them.
Your automatic assumption that I had blocked your comments is offensive to me. I will not engage you any further in this argument.
smorgasborg: Furthermore, I would like to point out that blocking comments from people who disagree with you has to be the cheapest low shot of any pseudo-intellectual “debating” style.
We have already seen on this blog your facile defence of deleting comments that it is not “censorship” because it is always possible to post the same comments elsewhere.
As both a contributor and commenter here at Gates of Vienna, it is my pleasure to inform you that your accusations are so totally out of line whereby the only lasting aspersions they cast are upon yourself. Congratulations, you couldn’t have done it without you.
In the GoV thread, “The Art of Strategic Citizenship, Part 4”, a rather salient point was made:
UltimateAwesomeness: latte, considering that turning the ship around requires quite a bunch of loss of human life, which will be overwhelmingly male, the question is not what will get the support of us, women, but the support of men. The way I see it, a man has no reason to support Western civilization and if I was a man, I’d probably rather convert to Islam and get slave girls when push came to shove, rather than protect some entitled fruitcakes, which is what the vast majority of Western women are. In reality, all rights are built on the death of men.
Whatever it is that comes out the back end of this impending economic crash and Islam’s global jihad will, in all inevitability, be delivered across the backs of millions of dead White males; not to mention countless more dead Muslim males but that is of their own doing.
Women had best pay close attention to this fact and the very real possibility that White males may lose a great deal of patience if they are expected to put up with any more of this ridiculous silence on the part of feminists ― and females in general ― when it comes to the Islamic threat.
Playing deaf mute in the face of something so vile as Islam wears thin quite rapidly.
One good thing about debates like this, they always expose the bigots.
ib: One good thing about debates like this, they always expose the bigots.
Now, now. Don’t play coy. Be specific. Otherwise you come across as just another obliquely insinuating nebbish.
We rec’d this email a while ago. It certainly sums up how many people feel about this thread:
Dear Baron and Dymphna,
I have to say that this line of discussion pains me greatly. I was an active member of the counterjihad for many years, under a number of different Interent names, which I prefer to not go into at the moment.
I have studied Islam for many years and I have done a lot, surreptiously but effectively, using my knowledge for the cause, for all those years. I knew Fjordman before he was Fjordman, and I was writing on the Internet against Islam before blogs even existed, and I was in the game years before even your good selves. I was a pretty damn valuable member of the early movement if I do say so myself.
I dropped away from the “movement” in disgust when the Roissy/Spearhead crowd started to invade our forums about a year and a half ago (note that I was already in the game nine years before these Johnny-Come-Latelies even showed up).
If you are going to take my rights away from me because I am female, I don’t see any point in fighting Islam or sharia, because what you are proposing is the same thing.
Women have fought in this battle and we’ve fought longer and harder than a lot of men, including Johnny-come-Latelies like Takuan Seiyo, Whiskey, Rollory, and all the rest. Brigitte Gabriel, Bat Ye’or, Hirsi Ali, Elisabeth S-W, Melanie Phillips, Phyllis Chesler, Oriana Fallaci, and more. I really resent these Johnny-come-Latelies from the perverted “Roissysphere” hijacking our forums and belittling the good and brave work that WOMEN have done for the cause for YEARS before people like “Rollory” even knew what Islam was all about.
I tried to post this at your site for all to see, but I couldn’t get Blogger comments to work for me.
I’ll continue to fight Islam on my own, but I part company with anyone who wants to take away my right to work, vote, or be an equal citizen in my country. I’ve read this blog for many years, but if this is the way it’s going to go, I’ll continue to go my own way.
Please do NOT go down this route. You will only alienate intelligent women like me who have given our hearts and souls to the counterjihad for years.
Thanks for letting me vent,
Just sign me
–A Dedicated CounterJihadder from Way, Way Back
A Dedicated CounterJihadder from Way, Way Back: Women have fought in this battle and we’ve fought longer and harder than a lot of men, including Johnny-come-Latelies like Takuan Seiyo, Whiskey, Rollory, and all the rest. Brigitte Gabriel, Bat Ye’or, Hirsi Ali, Elisabeth S-W, Melanie Phillips, Phyllis Chesler, Oriana Fallaci, and more.
Your list of women counterjihadists includes one I know personally and several whose works I have quoted for the better part of a decade.
I deeply regret having to say that they are, for the most part, statistical outliers. This, in no way, means to denigrate their outstanding work or to question their immense value to the counterjihad. Yet, the simple fact remains that across America and Europe women consistently come out in favor of government or religious policies that protect Islam from the criticism and legal proscription that it so richly deserves.
In contrast, a vastly disproportionate number of Western MEN continue to die in this fight and a relatively similar disproportion of MEN continue to carry the blogsphere banner in the counterjihad.
I resolutely maintain that it is a most damaging and conspicuous position that women have taken ― inadvertently or not ― in being among those with the absolute most to lose even as they are deafeningly silent about the barbaric misogyny of Islam and shari’a law.
What accounts for this and how can this exceptionally disturbing trend be reversed? I would much rather see droves of Western women step forward and join ranks with those of us on the counterjihad’s front lines than, ever for one minute, consider reversing any hard won equality of rights that has been gained over the last few decades.
I should know. I have marched in support of feminist causes all my life and actively worked ― much to my later embarrassment ― towards increasing the participation of women in American politics.
“If you are going to take my rights away from me because I am female, I don’t see any point in fighting Islam or sharia, because what you are proposing is the same thing.”
I don’t believe that was what was being implied – at least I hope not. I think the point was that if certain “rights” are destructive or disruptive to the body politic inasmuch as it protects the individual rights of all, then it becomes incumbent upon the majority to act accordingly.
I hope I’ve stated that correctly.
I’d like to 2nd the words and sentiments of a Dedicated CounterJihadder. Notice how few women have been commenting (as far we can determine gender over the internet). Most, like us, are are either reading this thread with horror and disgust or else have quit reading it. Looks like a bunch of men finding excuses to try to take away our rights to put us in an inferior position. Stupid and counterproductive. The general sentiment among intelligent women is probably something like FU. And you’re welcome to couple up with the less intelligent women!
If the majority of men vote toward the right and the majority of women vote toward the left (I don’t know the stats–but I’m sure some of the commentators do) there is still an enormous amount of overlap.
With respect to Takuan Seiyo’s last GoV article, given this enormous statistical overlap, to support a new, conservative community, all you supposedly-bright men would have to do is to select women who vote the same way and who have similar political philosophies (if any would have you after reading all the bilge in these comments). This is not such a problem. Repeat, earth to posters-on-this-thread: this is not such a problem.
I’m done. My enthusiasism for GoV has considerably lessened.
By the way, you had better also talk about taking away voting rights for Methodists and various other groups who are trending left in their voting.
EJGB: … if certain “rights” are destructive or disruptive to the body politic inasmuch as it protects the individual rights of all, then it becomes incumbent upon the majority to act accordingly.
You are on the money. A prime example of this is the over-reaction to decades of law enforcement’s wink and nod attitude about rape ― “boys will be boys” ― and gay bashing ― plain homophobia in action.
Now we have “hate crimes” that should never have been given special status and represent unequal protection under the law where simple equal application in a prompt and timely manned would have sufficed.
Women now have the ability to get a man arrested without a shred of evidence just by claiming rape. Even if the rape kit turns up negative, the guy is already in jail and his reputation smeared with an undeserving degree of permanence. The Duke lacrosse team is but one example of how false charges by women tend to stick.
Were the previous years of institutionalized disregard for the safety of women and gays fair or proper? Hell no.
Should compensation for them take the form of wholly unfair and imbalanced enforcement and prosecutorial protocol?
Well, that’s what’s happened and the entire “hate speech” and “hate crime” industry is eroding a major building block of American civil rights in the form of limitations on free speech and restricted freedom of expression.
Islam is capitalizing on this ham-fisted redistribution of judicial wealth and it promises a backlash that could just as easily reverse decades of progress. Gays and women must summon up the courage to come forward and agitate for traditional equal protection under the law or face the possibility that their refusal to help bring about the re-balancing a system that is totally out of control will, one day, be held against them.
on-my-own-in-berkeley —
I’m used to people renouncing further association with this blog after someone says something they vehemently disagree with. It seems to happen all the time.
Me, I like to hear a lot of back-and-forth — if everyone always agreed with my own thinking, things would get boring, and I would learn nothing. Yes, it means I have to tolerate a lot of wackos and trolls and whatnot, but that’s OK — it’s part of the price of a free and open discussion.
In this particular case, however, I’d like to point out that an open thread on this topic was requested by a woman, whose request is reproduced in its entirety at the top. The fact that she didn’t show up to participate is mysterious; perhaps she had an urgent engagement elsewhere today.
In any case, to divert the topic from a direction you don’t like, we need your active participation, and that of others who feel similarly. I’m sure you can make a good case for women’s retaining the franchise — I know I can — so why not make it, instead of just complaining about all these testosterone-poisoned cavemen who have hijacked the thread?
Seriously — the best antidote for bad ideas is better ideas.
A hearty thanks to latte island for suggesting this topic and to al-ttt, Sagunto, goethechosemercy, Hugh, smorgasborg, A Dedicated CounterJihadder from Way, Way Back, and on-my-own-in-berkeley for making some reasonable points about the topic at hand.
EJGB: Unfortunately, the surreal discussion here – as continued from another thread – is indeed about a proposed “Utopian” anti-jihad society removing the right of women to vote – so that men can “protect” women for the benefit of the greater society.
Baron: Really, no one needs to make any arguments for or against women’s suffrage. All of the pertinent arguments are available in the historical record of the modern British and U.S. women’s suffrage movements.
Baron B., I wouldn’t dream of not commenting on a thread I asked for. That would be rude. I’m often late for internet things, because of my strange schedule.
That said, I’m sort of appalled at some of the comments here. I don’t believe in group responsibility, although it’s inevitable that if the majority of X group (Germans, women, Jews, Muslims, etc.) behave badly towards the victorious group, the whole group will be punished, however unfair to some innocent individuals.
I’ll just say that if any particular group is systematically discriminated against, that creates social instability. So, it seems to me that when society, until recently, prevented some gifted women from using their gifts professionally, that was the root cause of the excesses of feminism. When all people are included in society, according to their abilities, not affirmative action, which I’ve always opposed, that creates stability, because no one is excluded and resentful.
Is society really better off, forcing women like Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, etc., to stay home and raise children? We don’t just lose their contribution, we create resentment that has to lead to social unrest and extremism. And the two great women I mentioned aren’t alone. How many equally great women haven’t we heard of, because they weren’t allowed to go to school? I’m not great, but it would have been a great injustice even for a modestly gifted person like me, to not be able to participate, to the best of my ability, which no one can do without society’s permission.
This is probably the longest discussion thread I have seen at GoV since I started reading here 5 years ago. Thats good. I guess that the site also attain a good deal of visitors. The technolgy seems a bit outdated however and posting comments is quite troublesome.
Would it then not be a good idea to leave Blogger? Maybe set up a wholly indepent site, if there was enough recources to do such available?
Kind regards,
Birkebeinr
Baron: Most of my comments are rejected by Blogger and NEVER show up. In other words, my comments are NOT caught in your spam filter. At present, I can only post extremely short comments. Hence my multiple posts. What a pain! 🙁
Again, I maintain that a lot of the “discussion” here is based on murky logic – and it would take too much time and psychic energy for me to unravel every faulty assumption. Who would read it all anyway? Who would change their minds? When the gulf is so wide, it becomes too much effort to contemplate.
It took women thousands of years to get to the point that the bulk of middle class women in the West are finally “allowed” to vote in various elections, attend higher education, work in a professional capacity, and, most importantly, choose compatible spouses (and yes, choice does indeed include the right to un-choose abusive – thus incompatible – spouses via relatively easy divorce).
Thousands of years to secure our GOD-given rights – and yet some women are prepared to backtrack into the Dark Ages on behalf of the fantasy that giving up their vote secures the “protection” of men.
Ironically, who do women require “protection” from? Oh yeah, MEN!
It also concerns me that so many people seem to equate homosexuality with the ridiculous extremism of today’s gay rights movement. Homosexuality, bisexuality, asexuality, and whatever I’ve left out, have always been part of culture. Some cultures have managed this part of human nature better than others.
One reason so many people here don’t even understand the subject is that it’s a feature of our culture to interpret sexuality according to the prevailing morality, which is heavily dependent on Christianity. The pagans were more permissive, and sexual expression other than heterosexual monogamy was compatible with a stable society.
Even Mesopotamian law was inclusive of bisexual adventures, even though it was expected that everyone would marry and have children.
Those of you who assume that all gay or bi people are inevitably the whiny extremists who are the most visible of that community today, should consider how easily various types of sexuality were included in pagan society. Was Alexander the Great subversive? The love of his life was one of his generals. I don’t want to give other examples, to save time and space, but if one reads ancient history and literature with an open mind, one has to notice that greater civilisations than ours accommodated homosexuality quite well.
Like feminism, the excesses of today’s gay rights movement are probably caused by our culture’s previous suppression of ordinary human rights for gays.
And where does this sexual conformity end? I’ve seen discussions on conservative blogs, where many otherwise intelligent people were against masturbation. So regardless of whether one is gay, straight, bi, or uninterested, there are probably very few people in the world who wouldn’t stand to lose, if sexuality could be restricted as much as some here would prefer.
Oh yeah, and UltimateAwesomeness sounds just like RebelliousVanilla….
Well, I found an old Blogger ID I thought had been deleted, but wasn’t, so I’ll put in my two cents here.
I am the Counterjihadder from Way Back who emailed Dymphna earlier.
This comment is directed to Zenster:
There are two types of feminists in the world, real feminists like myself and latte Island, Phyllis Chesler and Brenda Walker, and then there’s the multi-culti feminists like Naomi Wolf and Germane Greer, whom I despise. I have gone toe to toe with multi-culti feminists in various forums for years. I have also turned numerous feminist-leaning women away from Islam with my knowledge of that “religion” so it’s untrue that anti-jihad women are “outliers.” Both women AND men are woefully ignorant of Islam and it takes patience to educate them. But women are fully capable of being educated and “flipped” to our side, as I know full well.
Secondly, for anyone who thinks that female sufferage is the cause of the downfall of the West, let’s just note that the Communist Manifesto was not written by a woman, and Lukacs, Marcuse and Gramsci were not females.
Regarding the “contributions” of such as “Rollory” who want to take away my right to vote: may I ask what exactly qualifies you to post on a Counterjihad blog, friend?
Have you read about Islam extensively, for more than 10 years, as I have? Do you know the meaning of terms such as Pact of Omar, fiqh, Dar-al-Suhl vs. Dar-al-Harb? Can you name the five schools of fiqh and broadly, how they differ? Do you know what the Pact of Omar is, and why Western people should care about it? Have you read Mawdudi and Qutb? Have you read the Reliance of the Traveler, 23 Yeears, The Political Language of Islam and other sources detailing the impact of Islamic law on us “infidels”? Do you know what the Battle of the Camel was,or the Battle of the Apostates, or the Kufa Ambush, or can you write intelligently about the theological differences between Sunni and Shiite Islam? Do you know the names and bios of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs and why they are important to know? Do you know why many radical Muslim imams dye their beards and hair red?
I know about all of those things, pal. Yes, it required reading hundreds of websites and hadiths and books, and my tiny little inferior female brain suffered with getting through all those big words and long sentences and complicated abstract concepts, but I managed to do it. How about you? How come a superior-brained man like yourself hasn’t bothered educating yourself about Islam as extensively as I have done? The most important challenge facing our civilization since World War II, and you haven’t read a single book about Islam, have you? Too busy chortling over accounts of anal sex with 14-year-olds over at The Chateau to be bothered about it, aren’t you?
What makes you think that you are more qualified to vote than I am? I’ve actually studied the fracking “religion” that is the point of this blog, and I’ve turned HUNDREDS of people against it.
Don’t embarass yourself again by posting your inanities on a Counterjihad blog where people who actually know something about the subject of Islam post.
test
Lukacs, Gramsci, Marcuse and Marx were not women.
Let’s get down and dirty and point the fingers at the REAL cause of the weakness of the West, and it ain’t women. Maybe the vote should be taken away from men so that they don’t ever devise something as evil as Marxism again and kill 100 million people in the process.
As unpleasant as it is to confront this major fault line in the counterjihad, it has to be confronted somehow. I retired my blog and stopped commenting on any blog for over a year, because of the issues illustrated here.
But women need to protect their interests, and I have to admit, I can comment on almost any right-wing blog and get a fair hearing, while when I comment on a socially liberal and/or feminist blog, I do so to reach a few people, through the howls of the mob.
So we liberated women and our men friends can solve the problem on this side of the blogosphere more easily than the other side, even though we need to show up on both.
I have a question for the women who have either left the conversation or haven’t commented: where do you comment? Is there a forum for people who are both socially liberal and anti-Islam? that isn’t hopelessly universalist? or anti-semitic? Does anyone want to help me start one? I’m tired of my blog, but someone has to do something, obviously.
Dedicated CounterJihadder –
What can I say other than that I wholeheartedly second everything you have brought to the front.
In the wake of a fairly eloquent guru, working his way into the CJ initiative to promote his highly idiosyncratic vision about some kind of regressive survival-sect, some followers have demonstrated a penchant for collectivist group-think and in the process turned god-given natural rights into something akin to privileges, granted or retracted on account of statistical “evidence”.
Reading about initiatives in denial of the natural rights of say, one half of the Western populace, one is almost tempted to suspect some repressed fascination for Muslim mores to be at work, effecting this remarkable lapse into orientalesque mimesis.
I strongly resent the route that some of this is pointing towards. I can’t stress enough how much I reject servitude “for the Greater Good”, that is to close to the Islam-option for comfort. I have nothing but contempt for the so-called “Prophet” of Islam, and I am deeply suspicious of false “prophets” who are – willingly or not – leading the CJ-initiative astray.
Egghead –
You wrote:
“Again, I maintain that a lot of the “discussion” here is based on murky logic – and it would take too much time and psychic energy for me to unravel every faulty assumption. Who would read it all anyway? Who would change their minds?”
Well, it wouldn’t change my mind, but that’s only because your comments – in this and in the “survivalist” thread, provided me with little to disagree about. Would love a disputation with you, but alas, not this time 😉
Meanwhile I’d really like to read it all, provided it wouldn’t take too much out of your physical reserves, if you allow me this chauvi-male protectionist impertinence.
Kind regs, and take care, from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Tolerance must be subject to the mirror test – would I like it if this person died this to me.
While this is also known as the golden rule, or Matthew 7.v12, the mirror application of the golden rule can be applied to others in the form of arbitration and is considered less personal.
Q:Should women be permitted to vote?
A:Would it be ok if all men were forbidden to vote on the basis of gender? If the answer is no, then it applies to both genders.
Should white people be slaves on the basis of skin colour?
Should stamp tax be calculated according to religion?
Should boys be forced to stay totally covered in all weathers?
one can continue ….
gsw, the mirror test wouldn’t work, because everyone is different. Some people want things I’d object to. There are intelligent women bloggers, for instance Laura Wood, the Thinking Housewife, who prefers a traditionally feminine role. And why shouldn’t she have it? Who am I to say she shouldn’t have a society where women have a more traditional lifestyle?
Since people want different things, it could very well be oppressive to insist that every society have equal rights for all. I think it’s more sustainable and fair to organize society into smaller units, where people could choose their rights.
Voting could be seen as similar to marijuana. Some areas will have universal suffrage, some not. Some areas will have legal pot, some not. As long as everyone consents and has the right to move, what’s the problem? We’ll never agree on social issues, so the best way for everyone to get along is to separate and cooperate on the big things like trade and the common defense, as was already agreed on over 200 years ago.
Quote:
Baron Bodissey: A society will not survive if it confers rights upon its members which tend to bring about the destruction of the society itself. It will be replaced by a society which does not possess the same fatal flaw.
end quote.
And this is why Islam is on the fast track to its own destruction and transformation.
To learn from its errors is not necessarily to favor the rights society over the individual.
In Islam the dualistic perspective pits men, and particularly young men, against the rest of the society itself. Those who think themselves strong tyrannize, those who are frustrated tyrannize, and they all view themselves as living against women and children, not for them.
I also think that if young men had more perceptible constructive directions in which to take their lives, the world would be a far better place.
Let me also point out that these “Roissy” freaks who’ve tried to infiltrate the CJ movement clearly don’t know jack about Islam.
All they ever post about here is “gender relations” and “evo-psychology”.
When it comes to Islam, they clearly don’t know Hanafites from Hanbalis, or Shiites from Shinola.
That alone tells me that they are trying to hijack the movement for their own ends; fighting Islam is the LEAST of their concerns.
Well, while I was snorting in the seven sleepers’ den, y’all were beavering away like crazy here. Good on you!
Thanks for participating, and thanks to latté island for the idea. It’s obviously one whose time has come.
I think we could gain a better perspective if we backed off and looked at the what started the whole thing: the feminization of Western culture. That was Takuan’s original issue.
Those who want to roll back female suffrage are overlooking the fact that a large part of the cultural feminization process — “let’s make everything fair” and “no one must ever be left out” and “no one must ever suffer” — is overseen by men, and began long before women got the vote. Male politicians today may be converting themselves into girlie-men to troll for female votes, but that is obviously not the whole explanation.
Takuan is talking about an excess of yin, the female principle, that which soft and yielding. If our culture does not correct its current yin-yang imbalance, it will destroy itself. Nobody’s rights will be worth a damn once that happens — the imams will dictate the new rights for everyone.
This is the brick wall towards which we are headed. Suggestions for how we can decelerate the vehicle are welcome.
From Chapter 78 of the Tao Te Ching:
Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water.
Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better;
It has no equal.
P.S. Queen, I should have known that was you! Welcome back.
Queen: There are two types of feminists in the world, real feminists like myself and latte Island, Phyllis Chesler and Brenda Walker, and then there’s the multi-culti feminists like Naomi Wolf and Germane Greer, whom I despise.
Please rest assured that I despise gender traitors like Germane Greer. I’ve been outing her oblique support of FGM for several years. You can also be sure that I know the difference between ultra-feminazis and genuine advocates of gender equality like Phyllis Chesler, whose work I have been citing for just as many years.
Secondly, for anyone who thinks that female sufferage is the cause of the downfall of the West, let’s just note that the Communist Manifesto was not written by a woman, and Lukacs, Marcuse and Gramsci were not females.
You’ll need to provide verbatim quotes with cites before I’ll let you smear me with that sort of rubbish.
What part of:
I would much rather see droves of Western women step forward and join ranks with those of us on the counterjihad’s front lines than, ever for one minute, consider reversing any hard won equality of rights that has been gained over the last few decades.
… is unclear?
In no way do I advocate any rollback of universal suffrage. My position is one similar to the stance I maintain regarding the looming Muslim holocaust.
Quite simply, if things do not change for the better damn soon, there await some truly ugly potential consequences. Radical gay assaults upon the nuclear family along with the way that women continue to vote in support of PC MC politicians and governments that pose a totally flaccid response to Islam are among those things that need to change.
Which is all that I meant by noting how:
Gays and women must summon up the courage to come forward and agitate for traditional equal protection under the law or face the possibility that their refusal to help bring about the re-balancing [of] a system that is totally out of control will, one day, be held against them.
Queen: Have you read about Islam extensively, for more than 10 years, as I have?
…
How come a superior-brained man like yourself hasn’t bothered educating yourself about Islam as extensively as I have done?
My career and other life pursuits do not permit me the leisure of pursuing Islam to quite the depth you have. That said, Gates of Vienna has seen fit to publish several of my essays about Islam and jihad, so I must be doing something right.
With the formal knowledge of Islam you present yourself as having, I’m left wondering why you have not published here, too.
What I would appreciate is you refraining from such condescending horse puckey like how your “… tiny little inferior female brain suffered with getting through all those big words and long sentences and complicated abstract concepts”. Well, boo-fricking-hoo! As a lifelong supporter of gender equality I don’t need you or anyone else talking down to me like that.
And why in the Hell you feel obliged to spew such drivel as;
The most important challenge facing our civilization since World War II, and you haven’t read a single book about Islam, have you? Too busy chortling over accounts of anal sex with 14-year-olds over at The Chateau to be bothered about it, aren’t you?
… is beyond me. That is raw incivility, which is frowned upon at GoV.
Queen: What makes you think that you are more qualified to vote than I am?
Again, verbatim quotes and cites with links, please? I’ve never maintained anything of the sort. You’re trying to lump me in with other participants here in a wholly unfair manner.
Don’t embarass yourself again by posting your inanities on a Counterjihad blog where people who actually know something about the subject of Islam post.
You mean inanities like “… chortling over accounts of anal sex with 14-year-olds over at The Chateau”?
Pot → Kettle → Black
Zenster –
You might have missed this part, posted after the first paragraph, where @Queen directs her comment @Rollory:
“Regarding the “contributions” of such as “Rollory” who want to take away my right to vote: may I ask what exactly qualifies you to post on a Counterjihad blog, friend?”
It might be that all of her subsequent remarks weren’t directed at you at all.
Take care,
Sag.
Zenster, most of my remarks were directed at “Rollory”, not at you. I know you are a dedicated CJer. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Baron: thanks for the kind welcome back.
IMHO, it has reached the point where this thread needs to be terminated.
The initial tenor of discussion has now devolved into a pissing contest of who has done more for whom and for how long.
It is – in the final analysis – irrelevant.
IMHO…
I have never experienced so fully having my words and ideas twisted into freakish things I never wrote or thought.
An example: my opinion about women needing protection was pretzeled into a little hate glob & projected out there via the triumphant observation that the people women need protection from in the first place are…ta da!…men.
Like that wasn’t obvious already?
The same bell curve which shows men to be ON AVERAGE smarter (in the areas our culture rewards) and stronger than women also shows that the outliers on this curve contain lawless, barbarian MEN. Those outliers are dangerous and bestial. When they group together, the barbarity rises exponentially. A lone person against a group of these beings is in danger, but a woman is in particular danger of being used. Of course, she might have her super-strong robot to protect her against this mob o’ yobs. That is, if she has sufficient funds to buy her robot protection and the smarts to maintain it in good working order. Other women? Not so lucky.
[On a side note, Islam’s primitive gender arrangements make for a much larger population of male barbarian outliers. Thus women are especially unsafe in that environment of poisonous patriarchal supremacism.]
My other questions, though repeated, were never responded to in good faith, either. Again, they were used to score easy one-up debate points. Those questions remain:
1. Has our culture improved since the ‘liberation’ of the 60s?
2. Are the children flourishing?
3. Are families more secure?
=========================
The structure of this thread resembles those I read on the far left. A kind of mirror image. Definitely both are ‘through a glass darkly”. They have folks who believe women are superior and designed to rule. We have their opposites: men who think patriarchy is going to make a comeback. Both ideas are risible and both comment extremes are uncomfortably reminiscent of what was done to poor Larry Summers.
Baron and I have a rule re posting: whichever of us wrote a given post is responsible for maintaining the thread. Since this one is his, I’m not going to let the door hit me on the behind as I head out. My attempts at communication failed utterly. Rather than throw away any more time or energy I’m going to follow those others who’ve left already.
If I post again – I have already made several commitments to do so – I’ll make like Lawrence Auster & close comments. My other choice is not to post at all, which is pretty much what I’ve been doing…and now I remember why.
Dymphna –
In the spirit of the absolute tenacity which my lovely lady swears I am cursed with, and brevity which I am NOT noted for, I will attempt to answer those three questions.
1. Has our culture improved since the ‘liberation’ of the 60s?
Answer: In some ways yes, in others – no.
2. Are the children flourishing?
Answer: Technologically, yes. Socially, morally, and emotionally – I don’t believe so.
3. Are families more secure?
Answer: No.
EJGB –
I see your point (previous post), but I think this thread needn’t be closed for the reason you mention.
Yet, suppose someone would jump at your request, I’d like to take you up on the fact that you mentioned both J. S. Mill and Benjamin Franklin, to support your views.
You might find it interesting to know that it was Franklin who vehemently opposed Mill’s assertion (made in “On Liberty”), that freedom in the economic sphere wasn’t necessary. Franklin argued that especially for the common man, freedom of contract, of free enterprise, of the free market and so on, in short, freedom in day to day economic matters, was perhaps more essential than the freedom of speech, the latter being more of interest to high minded intellectuals like Mill himself.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Sag:
I have been referred to as a man of contradictions. Clearly, there may be some truth in that.
I cited Franklin in what was apparently a misguided attempt to illustrate that he, too, was a man of contradictions, in that although – as you correctly point out – he opposed Mill’s economic philosophies, he contradicted himself in his statement regarding freedom and security.
Mill, on the other hand, was a staunch advocate of “high-minded” ideals such as freedom of speech, of the press, and of political expression – which ultimately were and are of more benefit to the common man than merely the freedom of economic self-determination, since arguably you cannot have the latter without the former.
EJGB –
I want to avert the impression that we’re sidetracking here, for Mill – as the arch progressive that he was – is i.m.o. of vital importance to the topic at hand.
You obviously have read my previous comments as to why I think that Mill has been a disaster, especially for the common man, and how useful he could be to explain the peculiar progressivist mentality (giving up individual rights in the “Service of Man”) that seems to have crept in some of the discussions at GoV, especially those that deal with the u- or dystopian vision of retreating into secluded enclaves of Western civilization.
But don’t take my word for the disaster that Mill really was for Western liberty, here’s what prof. Raeder has to say on the subject:
“Mill muddied the waters of classical-liberal philosophy and practice by his conviction that the end of government is the all-encompassing “improvement of mankind” and not the preservation of individual liberty-under-law, as well as by his self-conscious embrace and advocacy of the “social” moral ideal. Moreover, Mill’s ambition to replace the theologically oriented society of the Western tradition with one grounded in and oriented exclusively toward Humanity necessarily entailed a departure from classical liberalism. For individual liberty-under-law, as historically understood in the West, is crucially and inseparably wed to the belief in a law higher than the enactments of mankind, as well as to the sanctity of the person that derives from his or her source in God. In short, Mill’s attempt to replace God with Humanity not only eviscerates the higher-law tradition crucial to the preservation of individual liberty and limited government but their spiritual foundation as well. For it is the transcendent spiritual purpose of each human being that, historically and existentially, engendered and sustains resistance to the pretensions of merely political power. When “Humanity” is elevated to the ultimate source and end of value, the political rulers become, in effect if not in name, the new gods.”
Recommended reading: L. C. Raeder,“John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity” (2002)
Sag.
So Mill was a humanist. Most of his contemporaries were. That doesn’t necessarily detract from the benefits of the reforms his ideas led to.
That said, the man wasn’t perfect in his philosophical machinations. Just forward thinking.
Queen: Zenster, most of my remarks were directed at “Rollory”, not at you. I know you are a dedicated CJer. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Thank you very much for clarifying. No harm, no foul then. I found it difficult to believe we were at such odds and am relieved to see that nothing of the sort applies.
Hat tip to Sagunto for noting the same.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.
EJGB –
I think it best at this point to leave the matter at the well-known “agree to disagree” juncture. Perhaps we meet again sometime on the subject; thank you for the exchange so far.
Baron –
You wrote:
“I think we could gain a better perspective if we backed off and looked at the what started the whole thing [..]”
I agree, that would be wise indeed. Perhaps I step back from a slightly different position, for I’m not sure whether I agree with you on what started this (thread). I can only say – without getting too personal, I hope – that for me, the necessity for a second thread became obvious as soon as suggestions were made to somehow (the precise manner, pre-selection or otherwise, not being of central importance here) revoke basic natural rights, such as the right for women to cast their vote.
The “feminization” thread ended with that suggestion and this thread continued where the survival thread left off. I think that the debate about feminization (which also extends to men, of course) would have remained relatively unremarkable (that’s not the right word, but soit) if it hadn’t been for the abovementioned far reaching suggestions about voting rights.
I have proceeded to comment on the issue of retreating into post doomsday-enclaves and the necessity to pre-select the most suitable men and women, because I honestly believe that this issue lies at the heart of the muddled and sometimes esoteric group-think (at the cost of rights) that I detected.
Meanwhile, and though I know there’s no need, I thank you for providing the opportunity to discuss this issue.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Baron Bodissey: Until very recently a man did not have the “right” to break a lifelong oath given during the sacrament of holy matrimony. There was a good reason for this, as we are now discovering. Divorce was made difficult and therefore rare because its prevention served the deepest needs of an ordered and prosperous society.
Divorce has been a relatively simple matter for the last forty-odd years, and the results are obvious, even if most people prefer not to discuss them. Easy divorce has been more destructive to Western culture than just about any other recent innovation. I don’t really need to list the consequences here, but they include female and child poverty, violent youth gangs, poor educational performance, child sexual abuse, and many other devastating results.
And did easy divorce make its practitioners happier and more fulfilled?
latté island: But women need to protect their interests …
Baron, have you ever been to the Philippines? I have and over there the Church has managed to have its doctrine inserted into national law so that divorce is flat-out prohibited. What happens then? Many Philippine men simply up and leave their wives ― and, just as often entire families ― in order to take up with their next paramour. The result? Innumerable fatherless and unsupported families with starving children begging on the street who are vulnerable to sexual abuse, gangs or human trafficking.
I’ll just say that a walk on foot through urban Manila can break your heart in a hundred ways.
Do I like divorce? Having seen it up close as a youngster ― replete with child abduction, stalking, infidelity and horrible step-parents on all sides ― I can answer with a solid, “no”. Should people have the right to divorce? I have to answer with an unequivocal, “yes”.
Has the ease with which a divorce can be obtained worked against society in general and children specifically? I am obliged to say that it does. Men and women both seem to feel little compunction about dissolving marriages and families with a readiness that is simply appalling. My own perception is that a personal vow ― as in wedding vows ― has little meaning because so few people hold their own integrity in very high esteem. Nor does society seem to punish people very much for breaching their integrity.
Atomization, urban anonymity ― whatever you wish to call this gradual process of breaking down societal cohesion ― has resulted in a culture where individual reputation and character are no longer subjected to a lot of scrutiny nor is there much emphasis placed upon moral fiber. The ascendance of rap or “gangsta” culture spells out this deterioration with brutal clarity.
latté island: … I have to admit, I can comment on almost any right-wing blog and get a fair hearing, while when I comment on a socially liberal and/or feminist blog, I do so to reach a few people, through the howls of the mob.
This is something that I have noticed as well. It is also responsible for a large part of my conversion away from Liberal politics. The amount of hysteria and shouting down that is allowed to happen in Leftist forums is an indictment of how supposedly open-minded they really are.
I have routinely encountered far more well-thought-out and cogent arguments at Conservative sites where the tenor of debate is of such consistently higher quality that I was quite unable to ignore it.
Sag:
I have enjoyed the exchange. I prefer discussions where ideas are examined and debated, rather than preached and reduced to diatribe.
Thank you. I look forward to future discussions.
Eric
@ “The position I take is that self-interest DOES indeed trump all other considerations.” – Smorgasborg. And you too, anti-natalist Nightmare (no pun intended):
It took Will Durant more than three decades to write the monumental The Story of Civilization. After finishing the ten volumes of the Story, it followed the essay The Lessons of History, which reflects both Durant’s erudition and his accumulated wisdom. I read The Lessons of History in 1996 and would like to quote some excerpts from one of the chapters, “Biology and History”. No ellipsis added between unquoted paragraphs:
/Quote:
So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. We are all born unfree and unequal. Nature loves difference. Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization.
Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave man free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteen-century under laissez-faire.
Utopias of equality are biologically doomed.
The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use of organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly. She has a passion for quantity as prerequisite to selection of quality. She does not care that a high rate has usually accompanied a culturally low civilization, and a low birth rate a civilization culturally high; and she sees that a nation with low birth rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group.
It is amusing to find Julius Caesar offering (59 B.C.) rewards to Romans who had many children, and forbidding childless women to ride litters or wear jewelry. In the United States the lower birth rate of the Anglo-Saxon has lessened their economic and political power. So the birth rate, like war, may determine the fate of theologies; just as the defeat of the Moslems at Tours (732) kept France and Spain from replacing the Bible with the Koran.
There is no humorist like history.
/end quote
Talking about “the empire of the Yin”, or how feminized the Western males have become…
It may be indicative of a serious blind spot here at Gates of Vienna that so few others took exception to the anti-human fanaticism exhibited by Nightmare.
Even if this world managed to rid itself of Islam and the dire peril of jihadist nuclear attacks or other types of WMD assaults, there would still remain another serious threat in the form of individuals like Nightmare.
Image someone (or a group) with such a deep seated hatred of all humanity gaining access to a pair of keys and ICBM launch codes or several drums of modified Ebola (hemorrhagic fever) virus. This sort of maniac would happily welcome unimaginable death tolls without a twinge of conscience.
Long after Islam is nothing more than a bad memory and Communism has been ground into the dust mankind will still have to beware this ultimate wolf-in-the-fold.
Just like numerous Islamic imams, those such as Nightmare prescribe suicide to so many others but, somehow, never manage to lead by example and rid our world of their morbid selves.
In a not-too-distant-future where asteroids will be steered and parked like so many rental cars and mankind has invented even more unimaginably powerful weapons, there will linger a most terrible danger in the form of those like Nightmare who are capable of terming humanity’s extinction as a desirable and “moral” concept.
I suggest that now is the time to call out and denounce such individuals whenever and wherever they may surface so that no quarter is given them in civilized society. Much again, like Islam, tolerance only permits the danger to multiply.
EJGB (or was it EGJB? I forget) wrote:
“Morality, as a humanistic construct, can and should be defined as the mores and ethics which uniformly bind a society together for the common good (utility). Individual liberties – while important – mustn’t contravene overall welfare and social cohesion.”
This is a perfectly empty paragraph; and that may be proven by the fact that Muslims, using Islam, may say — with perfect consistency and cogency — exactly the same thing about their model society.
Hesperado:
In response to your critique of my statement I say –
hmmm…
Dymphna: Has it ever occurred to you that your ideas are perhaps (ahem) less criticized out of deference to the fact that Baron and you run this quite wonderful (really!) blog? Thus, perhaps you are less used to criticism. If you make a comment, be prepared to hear it criticized just like everyone else – without complaint that bona fide criticism of your idea is “hate” speech! It is quite amusing how “leftist” the various commenters on this site have sounded on this particular thread. It is the mien of the left to claim that people who disagree with them are practicing “hate speech,” but I expect more from you. 🙂
That said, I find it totally incredulous that any woman today – whether you or any Islamic woman living in the West – would argue to eliminate women’s suffrage for any reason.
The idea of women voluntarily abandoning their suffrage is so absurd that it is difficult for me to take this entire conversation seriously – even in the abstract.
If Western men are to “force” women to abandon women’s suffrage in order to secure women’s safe passage from Islam and its horrors, then SHAME, SHAME, SHAME on any men who would require that barter. Your mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters deserve more respect and consideration.
Egghead —
It would behoove you to read Dymphna’s comments more closely.
I just re-read all of them, on both threads. She never said she wanted to “eliminate women’s suffrage” or anything similar. She said:
“I don’t think I ever said women shouldn’t vote. In fact, I demonstrated the fact that they led the Abolitionist fight, proving once again the moral force women can be.
“What I did propose (for the purposes of discussion only) is whether or not the ‘right’ to vote wouldn’t be better based on other considerations besides being a warm body…”
This is something quite different, and even a feminist should be willing to discuss it without great rancor.
The granting of the vote to women was not an unmitigated good — few things are. But that doesn’t mean that we think it should be removed. Quite the opposite.
I know my wife, and I know her opinions, which are similar to mine. We’re both concerned with the feminization of Western culture, which is one of the major factors contributing to its imminent destruction. The issue urgently needs to be addressed, and there’s no reason to inflict the Larry Summers treatment on anyone who dares to talk about it.
@Egghead–
I find it totally incredulous that any woman today – whether you or any Islamic woman living in the West – would argue to eliminate women’s suffrage for any reason.
And, in turn, I am puzzled that you were able to read ANYWHERE IN MY WORDS the idea that women’s suffrage should be limited or rescinded.
Yes, my original sin was being ironic & flip at first in my reply to Takuan when I said I “couldn’t wait for the return of the patriarchy”…or WTTE. I presumed our readers, familiar with my ideas, would “get” the level of absurdity in what was intended as a throw-away line, a joke. Obviously I was mistaken.
However, I spent a much longer time explaining why women had *earned* the vote (in the US, anyway) by being the moral force behind Abolition. One shouldn’t have to earn it, but that experience prepared those courageous women for the long slog toward gaining universal suffrage.
After pointing to their valiant efforts, I SUGGESTED that we might be better off reframing the discussion, moving away from gender “rights” and toward a more rational focus on economic bases in earning citizenship. It was simply an off-the-cuff thought experiment.
IOW, what I wrote was a description of a possible alternative to our current requirements for voting. The franchise as it stands now descends all the way to the grave and beyond. Our electoral privileges have been trashed and debased. Thus the need for new foundations seems obvious.
There is a big difference between descriptive versus normative speech. Look at what I really said, not what you say I wrote. I prescribed no course of action, and no-freaking-where did I remotely even imply that women shouldn’t have the vote. You inferred a great deal that doesn’t exist except in your assertions.
What I was suggesting — that we look at new ways of awarding the privileges of citizenship – has been done by others. An economic qualification for voting rights is worth consideration, if only because our culture, for better or worse, has an economic basis and at least some of the attendant consequences would serve us well.
When Queen Margrethe of Denmark wrote her autobiography a few years ago, she made this suggestion in setting up guidelines for future immigration. She thought people coming into her country
ought to have job skills and money enough for housing, and they ought to learn the language. She wanted to limit “spouse” citizenship to those (mostly women) from the old country to a minimum age of 24. She also admitted she’d been “lazy” about thinking thru the effects of immigration.
Her ideas were the origin for my own musings.
I won’t permit further comments distorting what I say. There is a standard of truth and integrity at stake here, and I refuse to be further bullied, to be assigned words or beliefs that have never been mine.
This persistent attack based on fallacies is calumny. Any further episodes will be treated as such.
==
N.B. You haven’t been reading my comments for any length of time if you believe that people hold back in their criticisms. In fact, this is the first time in six years (outside the fever swamps of LGF) that a would-be critic put words in my mouth. I’m quite capable of being hoist by my own petard; I don’t need people to make stuff up for me.
“What I did propose (for the purposes of discussion only) is whether or not the ‘right’ to vote wouldn’t be better based on other considerations besides being a warm body…“
Excellent idea. If we’re going to base voting rights and representation for Congressional apportionment on, say, reciprocity instead of mirror-fogging, what’s a worthwhile criterion? What kind of investment in society and its future should be required to have a say about its path?
Excellent idea. If we’re going to base voting rights and representation for Congressional apportionment on, say, reciprocity instead of mirror-fogging, what’s a worthwhile criterion?
—
The first step would be to increase the voting age so that it is back to what it was before 1972 (21). In fact, I would increase it to 22-24, as that is when most young people start their careers. Exceptions would be made for active military personnel who could vote at 18 (so no one would be faced with having to die for their country before having a say in how it is governed.)
Those receiving public assistance would not be able to vote until they had a job or other source of non-governmental income.
Proficiency in English would also be required. Voters would have to prove that they could read the voter form before being allowed to vote. (Not sure how this could be enforced.)
Citizenship: For immigrants, I would limit the franchise to the third generation (as is done in Mexico.) This is because most immigrants tend to have divided loyalties and also tend to favor open borders (so that they can bring in more of their relatives and co-ethnics.) Obviously, no non-citizen voting, no felons voting, and no dual citizenship allowed.
OT but sort of relevant to the earlier discussion about divorce: the divorce rate in Saudi Arabia is significantly higher than in the US:
http://arabnews.com/saudiarabia/article300603.ece
62 percent! What hypocrites. Their imams are always slamming the West’s “immoral” lifestyles.
Baron and Dymphna: I am glad that BOTH of you have taken the time to clarify your true feelings about the right of women to suffrage.
Re-read the ladies’ comments on the two threads in question. I sincerely believe that, based on your own words and your deafening silence to the comments of others, quite a few commenters here were confused (and thus dismayed) about your opinions about the issue of women’s suffrage.
Dymphna, I believe that you can clarify your thoughts without 1) twisting my words and intent (oh yes, you did, think robots), 2) threatening to take your proverbial marbles and go home from the thread discussion, 3) accusing me of distorting your words, 4) calling me names like bully, or 5) threatening to ban me (because that is the definite idea that I got from your last comment). Have you heard of the concept of “fair fighting”?
Fair Fighting
Before I wrote my last comments, I did re-read ALL of BOTH of your comments on BOTH threads. I am of the opinion that it would have been to BOTH of your benefit to clarify your true feelings about the right of women to suffrage much earlier in the discussion. Your previous comments were too oblique to be understandable. Your present comments are clear.
You can choose to displace your anger to me for being confused; but, in this case, you did indeed hoist yourselves by your own petards. Oh well! Hopefully, we will all live to “fight” another day! Otherwise, I still wish you all the best. 🙂
Egghead —
I am of the opinion that it would have been to BOTH of your benefit to clarify your true feelings about the right of women to suffrage much earlier in the discussion.
I don’t agree. Much of the time it is not to my benefit to reveal my opinion concerning what everyone is arguing about.
I value the role that my avatar (Otto von Bismarck, that is) assumed: the “honest broker”. I have opinions on some things, and on others I do not. Sometimes I have good reason to express the opinions I have. Sometimes I have various reasons not to express them, and one of those reasons is to let the debate proceed without having the host’s muddy boots traipsing around in it, interfering with what our guests have to say.
I voiced my opinion on women’s suffrage when it became plain that the situation was getting out of hand.
I don’t like to try to make other people agree with me; it’s fine with me if they don’t. Then I can listen and learn a different point of view, and sometimes change my own mind as a result.
Queen can testify the fact that she and Conservative Swede changed my mind on several things a few years back. I disagreed with them at the time, but I listened carefully, thought about it for a while (months, in some cases), and realized they were right.
I hate being wrong. So now I keep my mouth shut more of the time, to make it less likely that anyone will catch me out in an error.
Sagunto: You are too kind.
Recently, Baron posted an excellent article by Kresten Schultz-Jørgensen that explained how to reason:
“That effort includes, first and foremost, the demand for logic. Are you able to think in a stringent way? Then comes the demand to think freely — do you have the gifts of doubt and curiosity? Next comes the demand to set forth arguments and carry a burden of proof, and the demand for appropriate context.”
“Well, and then the subjectivity of your own arguments: Why — and now we’re back to Socrates — why do you really hold the opinion that you do? All of these points should be lucidly clear before you throw your judgments of value in the face of everyone else.”
Sagunto: When I mentioned the murky logic of the two recent threads, I felt that some commenters discussing whether men or women are smarter and the right of women to suffrage were simply expressing personal opinions rather than using logical reasoning.
Starting with Pandora’s opening her nasty box and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, men have blamed women for introducing evil to the world.
Blaming the Yin feminization of Western culture for the import of Islam is more of the same – just blaming women in particular for the flaws of humans in general – and then using that blame to deny women rights which would enable women to mitigate whatever evil is du jour.
Summary: Women are always a convenient scapegoat for the world’s problems.
Baron, I capped the parts of your initial essay that concerned me below:
“I’ll just put in MY OWN TWO CENTS before the food fight starts in earnest.”
“ALL THE RIGHTS WOMEN HAVE or might want to have — or the rights held by anyone else, for that matter — do not trump the rights of the larger community. When any given personal right, if fully exercised by large numbers of people, threatens the existence of the community or the culture at large, then that right is FORFEIT.”
“In the case of WOMEN, such issues might include VOTING, abortion, contraception, etc.”
“the feminization of Western culture…is one of the major factors contributing to its imminent destruction”
Bingo!
Egghead –
I read the article, you mean this one I trust?
Your quotation is probably the only good thing to take home from that piece. Otherwise – for reasons I hope to have explained well enough – I thought it to be not that good an article. The author reminded me of the school director in Amsterdam, who blamed Twitter instead of the (intra-)Islamic violence, when a Moroccan girl put a “slutty” picture of herself on the internet.
And yes, women have been scapegoated, and men have been, just the same. Scapegoating is always a game that collectivists of all stripes love to play. Above all – and in these threads yet again, freedom a the free exercise of natural unalienable rights have been the scapegoat. I hope to have shown that so-called “free speech” and “autonomy” advocates, like Mill, have been instrumental in destroying our traditional ideas about freedom. His agenda of progressivist “free”-thinking was to ultimately destroy organized tradition and religion.
Furthermore, I thought it might be wise to warn that the immense power of the state (also a replacement state) is very much like the Ring. It makes the (sacred) person disappear and therefore it shouldn’t be used, not even “from a desire to do good” (think of my oft used Chesterton quote here), for it will set us all on the road to serfdom. Like we’ve been this past century.
Kind regs – and stay well – from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Does anyone have any input on the franchise reform proposals I put forward last night?
This “he said, she said” line of reasoning is getting us nowhere.
—
Regarding the “feminization” of Westen men, does anyone have a definition of Western masculinity that does not rest on denigrating and demeaning women?
Because most of those with concerns of this nature do seem to have opinions of that nature (i.e. Rollory’s patronizing and insulting “women are good. . .at a lot of little things” etc.)
Queen –
Don’t know if I’m your guy, but let me try. How about:
The power not to give birth, seeking solace – and subsequently canalized, in ventures best described as “causa sui” projects.
I would gladly enter in discussions whenever concern is voiced that these projects have gradually been cast in the mold (or should that be: mould?) of the deranged altruism spread through progressive philosophy and politics. I would consider progressive “care” by an overbearing govt. as a possible symptom of “feminization”, though I must add that for me, this in no way bears any relationship to the individual rights of women. It is a concept that I’m willing to discuss only as a particular manifestation of progressivism, not in the dubious light of senseless “gender wars” that are of no interest to me. For freedom’s sake, I am opposed to enslavement, that’s why I oppose Islam; that’s why I oppose the “liberating” welfare state.
Just my two eurocents, from Amsterdam, kind regs,
Sag.
Egghead —
You neglected to capitalize the key word there: “MIGHT”. Some people might suggest that women’s right to vote should be withdrawn. I am not one of them, but other people certainly hold that opinion — that’s the reason why this thread was requested in the first place.
If I had meant that I thought women should lose the suffrage, I would have said so.
As for the feminization of the culture — that is a dangerous and destructive process. It began long before women had the vote, and was initiated by men — witness Bismarck’s welfare state in Imperial Germany.
If you don’t see that feminization of Western culture is destroying that same culture, then you and I see the world very differently, and hold different opinions about what is happening.
The current imbalance of yin will correct itself, perhaps catastophically. Whatever is contrary to the Tao cannot last long.
Sag, thanks for your comments. You make a good point of seeing the welfare state in that light, as a “nanny state.” I guess that could be seen as an aspect of “feminization.”
Regarding voting, even though you are a Euro and voting differs for you in significant ways, we in the West are all still members of the modern welfare state and all still facing the same basic issue: the fact that tax consumers are using the power of the voting box to fleece tax producers. With the former starting to outnumber the latter, especially because we all massively import tax consumers from the Third World. (Sweden’s ruling elite recently voted to provide all welfare state entitlements to not just legal immigrants, but to illegal ones as well.)
Queen –
Glad to be of some service 😉
And yes, you nail it squarely when you say that:
“we in the West are all still members of the modern welfare state and all still facing the same basic issue: the fact that tax consumers are using the power of the voting box to fleece tax producers.”
I am so glad to see that you just outlined – in a nutshell – the actual classical liberal theory of class struggle. Marx nicked it (of course, progressives always steal), without the reference to one crucial part: the role of state power as the sought for looting force. So it indeed boils down to rolling back the false and distracting ideas about class struggle and revisit the time honoured notion that, throughout history, the main bone of contention was always between a class of non-producing* people (and their clients), using the power of the state, in order to loot the producing people. In fact, much of the French “revolution” was about a large part of the populace demanding access to the looting business, i.e. get govt. and administrative jobs, which they did (the “new bourgeoisie” that Alexis de Tocqueville refers to in his “Recollections”).
The common good in this respect, is always a vehicle for state control (and looting). We should not be fooled into thinking – as some in the CJ-initiative do – that we can trust state worshipping bureaucrats to “reform Islam”. They are enslavers themselves who suffer from so much hubris that they think they’re capable of doing a better job than their Muslim clients.
But perhaps, just maybe.. Islam may do what critics of the welfare state couldn’t: creating more and more dissent among the general populace because the unholy alliance is becoming too obvious to be missed, even by those on a diet of NYT and CNN.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
* “producing”, not to be taken literally through some fallacious labour theory of value.
Baron, I think you are framing the whole debate on “the feminization of the West” the wrong way.
The way to get women to vote against Islam and multuculturalism etc. is not to take the vote away from us, but to point out that the importatation of misogynist cultures into Western lands via mass immigration is A VERY BAD DEAL FOR WESTERN WOMEN. (And ALL non-Western cultures are misogynist by Western standards.)For me it’s the foremost women’s rights issue of our time. The age of consent in Mexico and El Salvador is 12. Any mom with a daughter that age who’s walked her child in front of a phalanx of men of that ethnic group knows the score. Ditto the mothers of the 11 and 12 year olds being targeted by Muslim rape gangs in Britain. THIS IS A WOMEN’S RIGHTS ISSUE LIKE NO OTHER.
There is no way the multi-culti feminists can blunt this argument. You simply state, again and again, “Do you think that the importation of misogynist cultures is good for Western women? Do you think that a macho Mexican peasant man who’s been raised to think that a 12 year old CHILD is a “woman” will suddenly turn into an Alan Aldaesque lamby pie just because he’s suddenly been deemed an ‘American’?”
This argument will draw MILLIONS of women to our cause. But if you frame it in the unpleasant terms of “we need to punish the Western women for not producing enough babies” then you will just succeed in pushing more women into the arms of the worldview of the multiculti feminists.
The importation of misogynist cultures into the West is the issue, not “feminization” of the West.
Okay, I posted the above multiple times, please delete the dupes when they show up.
Having a serious problem with posting issues.
Egghead wrote:
t is the mien of the left to claim that people who disagree with them are practicing “hate speech,”…
I too have noticed this rather neurotic behavior from too many of those in the anti-Islam movement. It is important to add, though, that it is not manifested merely by recourse to the hyperbole of mischaracterizing one’s interlocuter’s words as “hate speech”, but can take milder forms which nevertheless partake of the same neurosis that reflects a curious inability to register criticism of one’s ideas without taking it personally and then, sometimes, derailing (or tending to derail) the discussion onto a level where personal pique is inappropriately given center stage.
While the most egregious perpetrators of this penchant are Robert Spencer and Lawrence Auster, many others exhibit varying degrees of same. It is not only pointless, curious and annoying; it is also counter-productive.
latté island: It also concerns me that so many people seem to equate homosexuality with the ridiculous extremism of today’s gay rights movement.
For some sort of explanation, look no further than my own previous comments about women and Islam.
Just as women have a fundamental obligation to protest and assist in the defeat of Islam’s attempts at imposing global shari’a law, so do ordinary gays have a moral obligation ― if only to themselves and how they are perceived ― to protest the distorted and harmful message of their radical counterparts.
Instead, much as with the legendary “moderate” Muslim, we see supposedly moderate gays remain largely quiescent regarding the anti-family views and derogatory attitude towards heterosexuals so commonly displayed by radical gays.
Why not come forward to repudiate these divisive and negative messages? It must be rather apparent by now just how badly the larger Muslim community tars itself by remaining so deafeningly silent on the matters of global terrorism and shari’a. Ordinary gays ― for whom remaining closeted should really not be much of an excuse any longer ― need to avoid this same public pitfall and voice some harsh criticism of the radicals in their midst.
I still contend that a far more serious issue is that of women continuing to ignore the obvious travesty that Islam’s purdah represents, be it in Islamic countries or as it is imported and practiced here in the West. Women are a much larger portion of the population than gays and have the power to alter much of public policy or perception about Islam in ways that males cannot.
Why that is and the entire conundrum of Western males being pilloried for the wrongs of the global male community and then placed in double jeopardy with White man’s burden as will left for another time.
Dymphna was quoted in a needlessly heated exchange between herself, Baron and Egghead:
“What I did propose (for the purposes of discussion only) is whether or not the ‘right’ to vote wouldn’t be better based on other considerations besides being a warm body…”
If by this proposal Dymphna is proposing society treat women as simply human without any “special” rights, one wonders whether (and makes the educated guess that) Dymphna and Baron believe that women and men are intrinsically different and that it is precisely the ideologically thorough equalizing tendency of Feminism — by mandating we ignore those differences — which has done much cultural damage. If so, it’s a having-your-cake situation:
Either women are to be accorded the same rights simply because we deem them to be the same as men; or because we want to extend them “special” rights because they are different. One cannot (at least logically) have it both ways.
Ironically, this same having-your-cake problem seems to be shared in a mirror image by the feminists in this regard; and both sides, I imagine, would deny the problem.
Queen —
I don’t know who you’re arguing against, but it’s not me. I don’t want to “take the vote away from” women. I’ve never argued that, except maybe facetiously, and certainly not in these two threads.
This was simply a topic brought up by other people, and one which I earnestly attempted to avoid involvement with.
My main point was (and still is) that no right can be considered sacred if it demonstrably leads to the destruction of the society which permits it. This seems a no-brainer to me, but others seem to disagree.
I’ve never said that “we need to punish the Western women for not producing enough babies”. I don’t know where you get these enquoted phrases, but I am certainly not the source.
I generally agree with you in what you say, so I don’t see what the issue is.
When I mention the “feminization of culture”, I’m referring to the current ascendance of cultural traits that are commonly considered feminine. They include:
* The requirement that nobody be excluded from anything.
* The demand for “fairness” in all human activities, public and private.
* The general insistence that no public good can justify any amount of suffering by anyone.
* The institutionalization of the forced sharing of private assets, a.k.a. socialism.
etc., etc.
These feminized values were first instituted by men well over a hundred years ago, so they are not an exclusively female preoccupation, even if they are commonly considered to be traits that are normally held by women.
Takuan has rightly characterized these trends as an “excess of yin”, but that description is opaque to readers who have little familiarity with traditional Chinese philosophy and theology. Hence the “feminization of the culture”.
If you can think of a better phrase, and if I think it will resonate effectively, I’ll adopt it instead.
Baron, thank you for the kind response. You are right: you did not argue for taking the vote away from women, but others did, and when I wrote “you” I was talking “you” in a general sense, not a specific one. Sorry for the misdirect; I was getting frustrated with my inability to post and was typing and writing very fast.
It can’t be denied that we seem to some WN-type guys here who seem pretty upset that Western women are not producing enough babies (Chechar, Sieyo and Rollory, for example). But I think they are going the wrong way about making the argument.
If they want us to have more babies, point out that if we lose the demographic argument, there go women’s rights, for us and for our daughters and granddaughters, because of the importation of misogynist cultures. And emphasize again and again how important it is to stop the importation of misogynist cultures in the first place.
This is THE women’s rights issue of our time.
—
“* The requirement that nobody be excluded from anything.
* The demand for “fairness” in all human activities, public and private.
* The general insistence that no public good can justify any amount of suffering by anyone.
* The institutionalization of the forced sharing of private assets, a.k.a. socialism.”
—
Agree totally that these are bad developments that often work against the social contract to a deletrious effect.
No argument there.
For example, lowering firefighter or police examination standards for women and/or certain “minorities” to get the property “diversity” mix. If this results in poorer public services, EVERYONE loses, including the women and “minorities” who are supposed to be helped by this.
This is an argument that needs to be made again and again. Individuals may come out ahead by lowering standards, but in the long run EVERYONE loses.
A Machiavellian strategy of implementing a one world order, would take a shape that looked to be of feminine quality in origin but might not be such in actuality. Although subterfuge can be related to weakness and a femimine tactic as opposed to attacking head on. Perhaps identifying the things that we think bear the birth marks of femininity in our own culture in its response towards Islam would be helpful. There are things that might bear a deceptive resemblance to womanly meekness but are not. Does effeminancy count as coming from women? Are there not other causes? Could we be confusing docility with femininity? Another idea for the cause of our seeming paralysis might be a confusion of signals in our culture — ” it was the best of times, it was the worste of times”. Like the famous immortalized canines of psychology books we are both trained and conditioned directly and indirectly through custom and nature to both heel and sit still — in effect to deny ourselves action. We men have been subjected by unseen master forces and the part of a male slave is the same as a feminine one they both sit still and follow orders. This whole thing could be cast into a master slave dialectic as well or a general male and female order of principles, both saying similar things. We cannot change the fact that women will usually be associated with a feminine,inferior, weak or slave principle, not on a individual basis or even realistically but rather as a form of communication and literary technique to capture ideas and present them in word pictures. This language most probably is male dominated and reveals a fact of nature and male psychology. Men do assess women as weak or weaker and importantly as non threatening.
Femininity is a gracefulness a beauty and attractiveness for men. It is generally gentler, softer, and submissive unless infected with a meme virus.
But beside the Western effeminate feminine principle and Islamic masculine principle and knowing what happens in Islam when those two meet. Is there not also something seemingly shut off or should I say cut off. When I ponder it it still brings me back to the idea that when we were more dominant, fierce, militant, and proud as a civilization we were more of a male dominant society, full of immigrants of Old World views, one in which children obeyed their elders, in essence more authoritarian but in a social and familial way not political. In that sense we were closer to that which mirrored the same in Islamic society. While that doesn’t change the fact that Islam is evil for us and every non Muslim. We had some “barbaric” ways left in us to do combat and extract respect. My point is, we can learn from our enemy and see ourselves clearer in both past and present. There may be something in nature and society which you cannot breakdown, separate and atomize but which are, as they say in the ID movement, irreducibly complex.
A Machiavellian strategy of implementing a one world order, would take a shape that looked to be of feminine quality in origin but might not be such in actuality. Although subterfuge can be related to weakness and a femimine tactic as opposed to attacking head on. Perhaps identifying the things that we think bear the birth marks of femininity in our own culture in its response towards Islam would be helpful. There are things that might bear a deceptive resemblance to womanly meekness but are not. Does effeminancy count as coming from women? Are there not other causes? Could we be confusing docility with femininity? Another idea for the cause of our seeming paralysis might be a confusion of signals in our culture — ” it was the best of times, it was the worste of times”. Like the famous immortalized canines of psychology books we are both trained and conditioned directly and indirectly through custom and nature to both heel and sit still — in effect to deny ourselves action. We men have been subjected by unseen master forces and the part of a male slave is the same as a feminine one they both sit still and follow orders. This whole thing could be cast into a master slave dialectic as well or a general male and female order of principles, both saying similar things. We cannot change the fact that women will usually be associated with a feminine,inferior, weak or slave principle, not on a individual basis or even realistically but rather as a form of communication and literary technique to capture ideas and present them in word pictures. This language most probably is male dominated and reveals a fact of nature and male psychology. Men do assess women as weak or weaker and importantly as non threatening.
Femininity is a gracefulness a beauty and attractiveness for men. It is generally gentler, softer, and submissive unless infected with a meme virus.
But beside the Western effeminate feminine principle and Islamic masculine principle and knowing what happens in Islam when those two meet. Is there not also something seemingly shut off or should I say cut off. When I ponder it it still brings me back to the idea that when we were more dominant, fierce, militant, and proud as a civilization we were more of a male dominant society, full of immigrants of Old World views, one in which children obeyed their elders, in essence more authoritarian but in a social and familial way not political. In that sense we were closer to that which mirrored the same in Islamic society. While that doesn’t change the fact that Islam is evil for us and every non Muslim. We had some “barbaric” ways left in us to do combat and extract respect. My point is, we can learn from our enemy and see ourselves clearer in both past and present. There may be something in nature and society which you cannot breakdown, separate and atomize but which are, as they say in the ID movement, irreducibly complex.
Baron, thank you for the kind response. You are right: you did not argue for taking the vote away from women, but others did, and when I wrote “you” I was talking “you” in a general sense, not a specific one. Sorry for the misdirect; I was getting frustrated with my inability to post and was typing and writing very fast.
It can’t be denied that we seem to some WN-type guys here who seem pretty upset that Western women are not producing enough babies (Chechar, Sieyo and Rollory, for example). But I think they are going the wrong way about making the argument.
If they want us to have more babies, point out that if we lose the demographic argument, there go women’s rights, for us and for our daughters and granddaughters, because of the importation of misogynist cultures. And emphasize again and again how important it is to stop the importation of misogynist cultures in the first place.
This is THE women’s rights issue of our time.
—
“* The requirement that nobody be excluded from anything.
* The demand for “fairness” in all human activities, public and private.
* The general insistence that no public good can justify any amount of suffering by anyone.
* The institutionalization of the forced sharing of private assets, a.k.a. socialism.”
—
Agree totally that these are bad developments that often work against the social contract to a deletrious effect.
No argument there.
For example, lowering firefighter or police examination standards for women and/or certain “minorities” to get the property “diversity” mix. If this results in poorer public services, EVERYONE loses, including the women and “minorities” who are supposed to be helped by this.
This is an argument that needs to be made again and again. Individuals may come out ahead by lowering standards, but in the long run EVERYONE loses.
Egghead: It is the mien of the left to claim that people who disagree with them are practicing “hate speech,”…
There is a relatively simple explanation for the tendency that Liberals have to engage in this sort of forensic misdirection.
So-called “hate crimes” and “hate speech” are an egregious redistribution of judicial wealth for the entitled class (or classes). Read: minorities, women, gays, etc.
This is quite similar to way that Affirmative Action was an actual redistribution of economic wealth (or opportunity) to much of the same entitled class.
Liberals and Leftists in general tend to identify themselves rather strongly with minority causes. The rebranding of Communism as “Social Justice” is a particularly glaring example of this.
Liberals and Leftists do not tend to do well on a level playing field because of how a substantial portion of their intellectual capital tends to rely upon Magical Thinking™.
If the pitch is not tilted by such artifices as “hate speech” or “minority rights” then their arguments lose a lot of substance. There is a childish subset to wishful or Magical Thinking that should not be ignored as it is quite instructive with respect to the behavior of said Liberals and Leftists.
It is of especial use to note how those who indulge in Magical Thinking ― as Hesperado observes ― often exhibit a:
… neurosis that reflects a curious inability to register criticism of one’s ideas without taking it personally and then, sometimes, derailing (or tending to derail) the discussion onto a level where personal pique is inappropriately given center stage.
This reconciles rather well with some of the characterizations provided by the piece I referred to. From the linked article:
Perception of linear time is avoided while cause and affect and natural laws are dismissed. In this mental disorder, focus is placed upon how things “should” be, while all personal responsibility is cast aside. The self and one’s comrades are identified as above criticism. Opponents are made devils, their ideas treated as laughable, and are personally attacked as idiotic, mentally unwell people beneath contempt, simply for disagreeing with magical thinkers.
…
Liberals attacking their “enemies” is a transparent tribal element of primitive Magical Thinking mindset. According to childish leftists, simply opposing their political, cultural or religious positions creates permanent enmity. (Emotivism is the philosophical theory that one’s emotions reveal objective truth.9) In other words, the people you hate are independently wicked—which you know, since you hate them. It is a pagan rite to imprecate, excoriate and execrate one’s enemies. [emphasis added]
Queen: If they want us to have more babies, point out that if we lose the demographic argument, there go women’s rights, for us and for our daughters and granddaughters, because of the importation of misogynist cultures. And emphasize again and again how important it is to stop the importation of misogynist cultures in the first place.
Le bingo.
For example, lowering firefighter or police examination standards for women and/or certain “minorities” to get the property “diversity” mix. If this results in poorer public services, EVERYONE loses, including the women and “minorities” who are supposed to be helped by this.
Et encore, le bingo.
All concerned –
I still maintain that the discussion – which now seems to have expanded from conditional voting rights for women, to conditional rights for all – is but a logical result from a certain view on “rights”. A view that – to my regret, signals a departure from Natural Law tradition towards progressive “Social Contract” engineering and, indeed, possible suffering for “social cohesion”. Natural rights, I repeat, are transcendent and unalienable. And please, don’t misunderstand them as hailing from the perverse framework of “Human Rights”, those being the basis for the multicultural entitlement-industry:”rights” in the sense of a claim to special treatment by a benevolent state. Rights that have become dependent on group-identity and circumstances as defined by the benefactor, showering these de facto privileges upon its clientèle.
The art and way in which the issue of conditional rights is set up, strangely enough follows a similar route: group membership can be damning for your “right” (that in retrospect reveals itself as a privilege) if statistical “evidence” points to a detrimental difference from a certain societal norm. This is all progressivist speak, larded with conservative sounding provisions. Population statistics are thus going to be the immanent scale that weighs for societal participation. Just like stats are used in today’s welfare utopia by whatever complaining “minority” group, preferably with “ethnic” characteristics, to claim forced entry into the workforce.
Base “rights” on “merit” and what you get is not rights in the respected traditional sense, but privileges.
It may seem wise at first impulse, to act accordingly under grave circumstances, but I do hope that one essential pillar of Western Civilization isn’t lost, once it has been – temporarily and under siege – discarded in favour of “social cohesion”.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Queen: … we in the West are all still members of the modern welfare state and all still facing the same basic issue: the fact that tax consumers are using the power of the voting box to fleece tax producers.
The double whammy occurs when a top tier of tax producers (the corporate oligarchy), use their influence (i.e., bribery) to persuade government officials that they should be absolved of paying even a small fraction of their proper tax burden.
When that happens (as it has), the Middle Class can bend over and kiss their butt good-bye.
Sagunto: Natural rights, I repeat, are transcendent and unalienable. And please, don’t misunderstand them as hailing from the perverse framework of “Human Rights”, those being the basis for the multicultural entitlement-industry:”rights” in the sense of a claim to special treatment by a benevolent state. Rights that have become dependent on group-identity and circumstances as defined by the benefactor, showering these de facto privileges upon its clientèle.
I was taught that rights are inherent and liberties are granted.
Zen –
The obvious solution (to me), is that the state isn’t allowed to rob anyone, and no one is allowed to rob others through the coercive power of the state. The income tax is the US is illegal anyway.
Sag.
Sag. —
The income tax is the US is illegal anyway.
This assertion is in error: the income tax was established by a constitutional amendment (Amendment XVI) in 1913. It is quite legal.
The bureaucratic entity known as the IRS may, however, be unconstitutional, and therefore illegal. And mandating the withholding of income tax from emplyees by employers is definitely unconstitutional.
That last little bit of legerdemain is what holds the whole oppressive system together. Without mandatory withholding, the entire edifice of the welfare state in America would become unworkable.
Ordinary people only permit such outrageous looting of their private wealth because it never really reaches their pockets in the first place.
Some food for thought, the idea is not mine but Frédéric Bastiat’s:
Economic freedom is based on a moral rule that – to a certain extent at least, most of us find perfectly reasonable: you have a natural right to your life and property and no one has the right to take that away.
Let me illustrate why, on a personal level, everyone seems to ascribe to that simple principle. For instance: if you’d walk into your neighbour’s home and deprive him of his money at gunpoint, you would immediately (or let’s hope so) be arrested as a thief. It doesn’t matter what lofty things you’d promise to do with the stolen money, for whatever social good, you’d still be put away.
But now the state does that very same thing, and all of a sudden it is thought of as somehow morally acceptable. Bastiat called this “legal plunder” and he pointed at three possible routes:
1) The few plunder the many
2) Everybody plunders everybody
3) Nobody plunders anybody
Today we find ourselves in the obvious situation that everybody is seeking government assistance in trying to enrich himself at the cost of his neighbour, option number two. Unsurprisingly, Bastiat called the state “the great fiction through which everybody endeavours to live at the expense of everybody else”.
So here’s an idea that might be considered way out there: what if we chose option three and decide to stop robbing one another? Why not stop doing things we wouldn’t dream of doing ourselves that suddenly become morally acceptable if some collective body invokes the magic words “public policy”?
See how this argument also applies to the whole “rights” discussion?
Queen –
My take on the whole quota thing, especially applied to whatever workforce, would follow in the wake of my economic freedom argument. Labour contracts should be a matter of two parties, employer and employee, with no external party involved forcing quota into the equation. Of course one of the participating parties could be the govt. itself. All the more reason to make it and its scope as small as possible.
Baron –
I don’t think I’m in error on the US income tax. Should I elaborate or just leave it at this point, as an aside? Wouldn’t want to digress to far from the topic at hand.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Sag. —
Yes, please elaborate.
Do you believe the 16th Amendment was somehow illegally drawn up and/or ratified?
Is the current tax code as written in some way illegal or unconstitutional?
Are the IRS’ methods of collection illegal? (Some of them most certainly are.)
Or is the whole system of income taxation morally repugnant and not in the best interests of the country? (I think this is true.)
Baron –
Perhaps I can be the harbinger of some good news 😉 That is, depending on how much you have wasted on government “services” already of course. I’ll try to keep this as short as possible.
To me, it seems the answers to both of your questions 3 and 4, follow from what I have to say about the first two (and from what I have said already about the moral status of govt. intervention in general, and with regard to taxation in particular).
Let me try to answer the first two of your questions in one go, so here goes.
First off, the income tax is unconstitutional because it is a direct unapportioned tax, not in line with what the US Constitution demands. Your Constitution says that a tax must be apportioned, if it’s direct.
The US Supreme Court has ruled on several occasions – between 1916 and 1923, that the XVIth amendment conferred “no new powers of taxation” to the government (besides what the Constitution says about direct and indirect taxes and the restrictions on taxation).
In 1894, Congress tried to enact an income tax and the Supreme Court told them it was unconstitutional. In 1913 they tried again, with the same result. So the US govt. didn’t have a constitutional basis for taxing the American public on their labour in 1894, and they didn’t get it in 1913 (“no new power of taxation”, according to the Supreme Court rulings). End of discussion. The government, requiring you to file a 1040, has been acting unconstitutional, the claim on your income has no basis in any specific law, and is thus illegal.
So, at present, there seems to be no law requiring US citizens to pay an income tax on their labour. Moreover, there has never been such a law. A lot of “tax honesty” foundations have tried to find the law that specifically requires any US citizen to pay an unapportioned tax on their income. In 2000 for instance, the “We the People” foundation issued a 50.000 dollar reward for anyone who’d be able to come up with the law. No one could, not even the (ex)-IRS experts themselves. People were put to trial for not doing their 1040 “duty”, and defeated the prosecutors because no law could be shown. Joe Banister, ex-IRS agent, would be a good name to “google”.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
continued..
And before you ask:
The definition of income in the US Constitution turns on “gains” or “profits”, from corporate activities. It doesn’t apply to your wages or anything.
Happy 1040 😉
Sag.
Sag. —
The facts you list are correct.
Unfortunately, you’re making the same mistake that various presidents and the Congress have made for the last 75 years or so: you assume that the Supreme Court can override the clear meaning of the Constitution.
It cannot. If the Congress or the President disagrees with a Supreme Court interpretation, they can refuse to recognize or execute it. This has been known to happen, but it was a long, long time ago — Andrew Jackson, iirc.
An amendment to the Constitution explicitly made the income tax possible, regardless of what the Supreme Court said later. The wording is clear.
I am aware of the movement to force the government to reveal the actual title and chapter of the US Code that implements the income tax law. Strangely enough, no one has been able to produce it — it’s very much like Barack Hussein Obama’s birth certificate in that regard.
Of course, Congress could make the whole matter moot by passing a new income tax law tomorrow, and it would be completely constitutional, imho.
But income tax withholding is clearly illegal and unconstitutional. It’s one of the reasons that makes me say that we have been governed unconstitutionally for a long time.
Unfortunately, all of this is widely perceived as the law. In that sense, nothing that the mandarins of Washington DC do is really illegal, in any practical sense. The rule of law has vanished at the federal level, so whatever they command is legal, since that is the “law” which is enforced against us unfortunate peons whose wealth is looted to line their plush chair cushions and pay for their lobster luncheons.
If the Congress says it’s the law, and the President say’s it’s the law, and no judge will rule against it, and the agents of the executive enforce it, then it’s the LAW.
We can bang our heads against this monstrosity as much as we want, but it stubbornly continues to exist.
Baron –
Thank you for your answer:
“Unfortunately, you’re making the same mistake that various presidents and the Congress have made for the last 75 years or so: you assume that the Supreme Court can override the clear meaning of the Constitution.”
No mistake on my part, nor did I assume what you state in the above quote. What I do assume, is two things:
– The definition of “income” in the US Constitution is about “gain”, not about wages. So the income tax doesn’t concern your pay check.
– The lower courts must be in compliance with Supreme Court decisions on the subject. The Supreme Court didn’t, not in any of those cases I mentioned, “override” the meaning of the Constitution, it applied the Constitution that was – and still is, indeed very clear about the powers of taxation granted to the government, as I have indicated.
My point is furthermore illustrated by the fact that, as you have signalled yourself, no one has been able to come up with the law (officials would have done so, long ago if any law actually existed) and, moreover, that many court cases have been won because the law could not be produced. In cases where people were convicted, the law wasn’t produced either, so what we have here, is the use of brute force, by the “welfare” state. Plain and simple.
I’ll leave this very entertaining and interesting detour at this point
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Sag. —
Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of those who interpret the law. I wish that your interpretation were the one that is currently regnant, but alas, it is not.
As I emphasized earlier, when the Supreme Court, the Congress, the Executive, the federal bureaucracy, and the officers of the law all agree on a particular interpretation, then it is the law, regardless of what ordinary mortals like me believe. Such is the case with the income tax “law”.
There are many other interpretations of the Constitution which the Congress, in its overweening arrogance, has seen fit to enact, and which the Supreme Court, from its lofty pedestal of inerrancy, has failed to strike down. The worst ones concern the Commerce Clause.
As I have said many times, we are being governed extra-constitutionally. Washington D.C. can do whatever it wants to us because American citizens have become passive and indifferent. The law is whatever the bureaucrats say it is.
That may change at some point in the not-so-distant future, but for right now, it’s still the way things are.
As a matter of interest, here is the text of the 16th Amendment:
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
That seems pretty clear to me, regardless of how it may have been interpreted later. The Congress has the power to take whatever portion of my income from me that it deems fit. And yes, I really would love to read the text of the resulting law, but when I delve into it, there are literally thousands of pages of it covering more than a century, and it is beyond my ability to decipher.
You may also be interested in this group’s analysis of the Internal Revenue Tax Code. There are plenty of statute-title-chapter references there from 1894 onwards, but it’s far too complex for an untutored citizen like me to understand.
Baron: To me, as an intelligent and educated counter-jihad and counter-New World Order woman, I find the clearly pejorative application of the term “feminization of the culture” as a putative reason for the downfall of the West to be offensive and inaccurate. The term appears to be an attempt to unfairly assign blame exclusively to women for the altogether HUMAN flaws of GREED and LAZINESS promoted by the Welfare State which you yourself maintain was “initiated by men” – to which I would add was also promoted and maintained by men.
All indications point to the fact that MEN value the Welfare State as much as, or more than, women. So, when does that MALE value for the Welfare State become assigned as a masculine value? After all, we could argue that the Welfare State is a societal manifestation of the male need or role to “protect” loved ones.
BUT, of course, the value for the Welfare State is a HUMAN value….
Egghead –
You may want to extend that list of welfare state-inspired “male needs” with the need for empire and go to war (on the behest of warmongering ladies, no doubt, but that’s not the point here). The point is that, to put it in concise terms: “the welfare state is the warfare state”.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Baron: “The current imbalance of yin will correct itself, perhaps catastophically. Whatever is contrary to the Tao cannot last long.”
Using your Yin/Yang metaphor: For 1,400+ years, Islam has worshipped Yang and excluded Yin. There is ZERO Yin in Islam, and yet Islam has survived and thrived for quite a long time.
The world today faces a battle of primitive tribal violence against advanced civilization – rather than a masculine versus feminine culture. If I were a Western man, I would want to be associated with civilization instead of barbarism, and I would resist associating civilization with feminization – as an insult to my masculinity.
Sagunto: Always interesting. 🙂
I was just sitting here thinking that the Welfare State essentially parallels polygamy in Islam. In other words, the Welfare State encourages men to have multiple female partners/families.
By assuring men that any progeny produced via any number of girls and women will be supported into adulthood, the Welfare State encourages men to reproduce.
The oft-cited (argh) biological imperative for men to “spread their seed” far and wide might indicate an inherent male stake in the Welfare State culture.
I quite liked Michael Servetus’ comment that “A Machiavellian strategy of implementing a one world order, would take a shape that looked to be of feminine quality in origin but might not be such in actuality.”
Do you really think that WOMEN would arrange to strip search everyone everywhere at will – or would that be MEN (generally – sorry – think about who uses pornography more – again sorry)! 🙂
Baron,
“In this particular case, however, I’d like to point out that an open thread on this topic was requested by a woman, whose request is reproduced in its entirety at the top.”
I don’t see what difference it makes whether the topic was suggested by a man or by a woman.
“Seriously — the best antidote for bad ideas is better ideas.”
You’re absolutely right. I stompted off and then was too tired and busy to return to the fray. And I finally posted on another thread. Like others, I’ve been having trouble with Blogger.
Egghead —
I’ll attempt to answer your salient points, although not quite in their exact order.
First:
…when does that MALE value for the Welfare State become assigned as a masculine value?
The welfare state was not what I was characterizing as “feminine”, but a series of general cultural traits which are commonly labeled as feminine. The welfare state partakes of some of them, but not others. For instance, the imperative for “inclusiveness” is generally considered a feminine trait, but it is not a feature of the welfare state.
In any case, I defined my terms carefully by listing specific characteristics of a “feminized culture”. Takuan’s alternative description — “an excess of yin” — is just as appropriate, but less accessible to the general reader.
If you can suggest a bettor descriptor which is brief and easily understood by most readers, I will happily employ it instead, in order that you might not be so offended.
At various points in your comment I find value judgments, subjective impressions, inferences, and other interpretations which are not inherent in what I said.
To wit:
…the clearly pejorative application…
I was not being “pejorative”, except to the extent that I think that an excess of yin is dangerous and destructive, which is indeed a value judgment. I may be wrong in my conclusions, but if I am correct, such conclusions can hardly be labeled “pejorative”.
…of the term “feminization of the culture”…
This term is explicitly defined, as I said above.
I understand that you object to it. That is not a sufficient reason for me to cease using it, unless I discover an adequate replacement, which must perform the same semantic task just as effectively with no loss of concision.
…to be offensive…
You are offended. That is well understood. But I have not been offensive.
Your being offended may indicate any number of things, of which I can obviously have no knowledge. But those things, whatever they may be, have nothing to do with my being “offensive”.
To take offense at something which was delivered without rancor and in good faith is solely the act of the offended person. Being offended is a decision made by the offendee, and not something which the person who made the statement did or caused.
…and inaccurate…
My assertions can be neither accurate nor inaccurate, since they involve a subjective evaluation of highly complex social and political phenomena, and are all open to different interpretations. They are not facts, so they cannot be inaccurate.
I defined my terms, and gave examples. You dislike one of the terms I used. Accuracy and inaccuracy have no bearing on the issue.
The term appears to be an attempt…
It “appears” to you to be something that it is not. My “attempt” does not have the intentions you ascribe to it.
You infer from my words an attempt to do something, but you are in error; you have not ascertained my intentions correctly.
…to unfairly assign blame…
“Fairness” does not enter into it. Concern with “fairness” is something I explicitly eschew.
Nor do I blame. What I describe are mass socio-political trends that have played out over the course of decades or centuries. Even if they make me angry from time to time, no “blame” is involved here.
The pond is full of algae. I blame neither the algae, the water, the nitrogen-rich fertilizer, nor the farmer. I’m just upset that the pond is full of algae.
…exclusively to women…
I not only did not assign responsibility for the things I object to “exclusively to women”, I explicitly assigned portions of the responsibility to men, especially the political leaders of the 19th century.
This part of your statement is without basis in fact.
[conclusion to follow momentarily]
[continuation]
– – – – – –
This covers the rough outline of your objections. If you continue to be offended, or hold anger, or resentment, or blame, or any other negative emotion concerning what I said, that is your choice, and yours alone.
I approach my interlocutors in this forum in good faith and with civility, and endeavor to receive what they say without rancor, even when I disagree vehemently. This behavior is not always reciprocated, but I will continue to practice it nonetheless.
Egghead –
In the final analysis, I think all of the male/female gender thing – also in the somewhat more esoteric “yin”/”yang” variety of magical experience – has been, and I repeat myself here, has been the consequence of a desire by some to follow down the road of creating some sort of CJ sub-movement (a retreating movement for sure) that i.m.o. shares many characteristics with a sect. One of the main drawbacks is, to my opinion, the apparent need for some kind of pre-selection of the ones worthy of this retreating arkian survival community.
Perhaps it is because I’m not one for the Jungian yin-yang wisdom, which is definitely not my cup of tea (might be a generational thing, I don’t know, our teachers loved it). Maybe I’m being overly sceptical when I suspect a guru or prophet at work, and being very good at it, like the voice of Saruman. But if the thoroughly un-religious yin-yang dialectic signals the route to a promised CJ enclave, I will be glad to, if ever comes the time, draw my hanky and wave the chosen ones a heartfelt “fare thee well” (not including the women who choose to hold their ground to fight another day). That’s my kind of women 😉
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
berkeley —
I don’t see what difference it makes whether the topic was suggested by a man or by a woman.
I mentioned that fact because you said, “Notice how few women have been commenting…”
If the sex of the commenters is salient, so is the sex of the person who seeded the thread.
When I started this thread, I simply assumed that latté island would be along momentarily to talk about the issues that induced her to request the thread in the first place.
My bad! She was not around, not until quite a while later.
I agree that the excess of virtual testosterone here might have scared off some of the dames. But the ur-men wouldn’t have scared off Ms. Island — it takes more than a few hairy slope-browed atavisms to intimidate the Lady from La-La Land. She’s a tough cookie; there’s no doubt about it.
Thanks, Baron. Just to set the record straight, this thread was also Zenster’s idea. I only suggested that we skip having an introductory essay.
Zenster, you and I are in general agreement about the gay thing, but when you refer to gays, or extremist gays, attacking the family, can you and everyone else be more specific?
I sort of know what everyone means, but there are important distinctions to be made. First, the family in general has gone through a lot of changes, so straight people could also be said to be attacking the family. I think people fall back on this cliche, because gay extremists get more attention.
Some gays want to marry and have children. Some gay people already have children from their straight marriages. And so on. So, when a reference is made to gay attacks on the family, it’s not always obvious to me what that means.
FWIW, I support gay marriage and gays raising children together. How is this an attack on the family? Gay marriage shouldn’t threaten anyone’s straight marriage, any more than straight marriage threatens gay marriage. If some people feel threatened, maybe they should ask themselves why. It’s not like everyone’s all of a sudden running out to marry someone of the same sex, just because it’s a possibility nowadays.
Sagunto: Thanks! 🙂
Baron: Thanks, too. It is my opinion that we are cross-talking with very little chance of changing each others’ minds on this particular topic.
We offer our opinions here in a marketplace of ideas that you (and Dymphna) graciously provide. For that, I am grateful to you both.
However, it is my sincere opinion that your use of the phrase “feminization of culture” sounds pejorative and is destructive to the larger goal of attracting increased female support to the counter-jihad movement.
latté island: Because you asked, the general idea is that the Western ideal of marriage is steeped in the Christian idea that marriage is a sacrament reserved for one man and one woman who are committed to each other for life in order to raise children for the larger purpose of creating good people/citizens – who, in turn, create a stable society.
Technically, all people are able to get married – as long as they marry one person of the opposite sex. Thus, no one is preventing gay people from getting married.
The acceptance of gay marriage changes the fundamental definition of marriage in ways that mutate to be very destructive to the overall goals of creating a stable Western society.
The same specious “civil rights” arguments used by the courts to wedge an acceptance of gay marriage into society now being used to argue for the legality of polygamous marriages as practiced by both Western Muslim immigrants and American fundamental Mormons.
Keep in mind that polygamous marriages are often incestuous marriages with much older men “marrying” underage girls and closely-related relatives – often in forced marriages arranged and approved of by the girls’ parents.
In Islam, the problem extends to “temporary” marriages which are merely elaborate Imam-approved and parent-approved ruses of forced child prostitution.
For large segments of women (girls, really) locked into repressive religions, the change in the fundamental definition of marriage mutates marriage from being a Christian religious sacrament accepted by two consenting adults and recognized by the state to promote the family into merely a civil contract that might very well lead to an outcome of forced child marriage that most Westerners would consider to be a criminal act.
For large segments of men (boys, really) locked into repressive religions, the change in the fundamental definition of marriage means that much older men will “hog” all available girls and women and deprive many boys and men of the chance to marry.
In addition, everyone locked in repressive religions loses the chance for romantic love where girls and women are traded or sold by contract well before the age of consent.
Most detrimental is the war that an acceptance of gay marriage wages upon Christianity and its values.
Because the forced acceptance of gay marriage has been largely enforced by courts as a civil right, people who disagree with gay (and other flavors of) marriage are liable to be branded as practicing hate speech.
Under Obama, the current plan is to introduce some pretty radical gay and transgender sex education into the public education system in the interest of fairness.
If heterosexual sex education is to be taught, then the doctrine of fairness dictates that homosexual and transgender sex education is to be taught.
Evidently, our children are to be instructed to “experiment” with ideas and acts that will certainly concern many Christian parents.
Egghead, all of those things are a concern, but notice that you’ve brought in all these other things that may or may not proceed from gay marriage itself. It’s not that a man marrying a man, in itself, leads to the other things, it’s that authority figures who have other agendas can use gay marriage as a wedge to get those other things.
I don’t think it’s a good enough answer, to say that A can lead to B, C & D, so we can’t have A. Are there not other ways to prevent B, C & D? than to deny people the right to A, which may be less harmful than the other things.
In addition, more inclusion of gay people and their ordinary rights, doesn’t necessarily lead to teaching rather advanced and icky types of sex ed. to young children.
The argument that gay people are free to marry people of the opposite sex, I’ll refer to as the Let Them Eat Cake Fallacy. Isn’t marriage supposed to be about the love two people for each other? And yet you and other people who make that argument are saying that only gay people, but not straight people, should do without the love part of the relationship, in order to accommodate the needs of society.
Here’s a hypothetical. Suppose Bruce and Bill want to get married. Both of them are right wing Republicans who hate the idea of radical gay sex ed in public school, and they’re against Islam, polygamy, etc. They just want to get married and raise Bill’s kids from when he made the mistake of marrying a woman. What’s your argument against that scenario, specifically, without the other what if baggage?
Also, I’d like to point out that when people marry because it’s good for society, but they’re not in love, they’re doing a great disservice to their spouse and children. When Bill married Jane, Jane really got ripped off, because Bill wasn’t in love with her, he was only trying to fit in. Is it really fair to Jane for some gay guy to marry her, just because society expects it?
And we’re only talking about a small percentage of people, anyway. If, let’s say, only 2% of people would want to have a gay marriage, how would that have such a huge influence?
Also, you mentioned Christianity. Should this apply to Christians only, or everyone? Doesn’t this make non-Christians a type of dhimmi?
I have heard that Obama’s plan is to force ALL schools to offer gay and transgender sexual education – that means public, private and RELIGIOUS schools will be forced to teach and promote “alternative” lifestyles.
Where religion conflicts with gay marriage, religion is expected to cede to the “civil rights” of gay and transgender people and abandon any religious discrimination or judgment of gay and transgender behavior and its negative effects on society.
Thus, in a gay-accepting military, priests and pastors will be forced to perform gay marriages – or risk being brought up on charges of sexual discrimination against gays. The result is that many priests and pastors will quit military service leaving Christian military families without spiritual guidance.
latté island: You had asked how extremist gays attack the family, and I am providing you the basis for that idea – bit by bit due to Blogger limiting me severely. ARGH.
I truly am a “live and let live” person, BUT I read more and more that the extremist gays are NOT.
If accepting gay marriage in any way diminishes the status of heterosexual marriage (via the introduction of polygamy) – or my ability to freely practice Christianity – or my right to practice free speech to criticize lewd gay behavior, then it behooves me to carefully examine whether gay marriage offers tangible benefits to society.
But, your argument is still, A is bad because it leads to B.
Obama isn’t pro gay. Democrats aren’t pro gay. Leftists aren’t pro gay. What we’re seeing now is that leftists and gays are using each other. Gays are, on average, a provincial, unsophisticated, marginalized victim group. They’ll latch on to anyone who will throw them a bone. This is due to historical reasons. I can go into more detail sometime, but let’s keep it simple.
So what you’re saying is that, merely because Obama and some elements of the gay left are colluding in some things, then gay people shouldn’t have basic rights? But isn’t that similar to the argument that women shouldn’t vote, because woman on average, etc…
You’re describing all this as a zero sum game. If gays get this, religious people lose that. True, only in the current toxic political environment. But what if gays had rights for the same reason that religious people have rights? Because they have rights. If Bill marries Bruce, no one else should lose their religious or other rights. If that happens, shouldn’t we examine what caused that? Maybe not Bill and Bruce, but the people who are trying to use them, who are the same people who use Obama…at the risk of sounding Gnostic.
Some of the ideas that you raise in your comment to me are more wishful thinking than reality. 🙂
I listen to conservative talk radio, and the extremist trends related to gays that I mentioned are actually happening.
It IS indeed the legal imperative of a societal acceptance of one man marrying another man that is DIRECTLY enabling polygamous men to argue that if any two people can marry then any three or four or more people should also be allowed to marry.
It’s essential for the Counterjihad to get clarity on these issues, and not feel threatened on so many fronts, because a few people want access to the institutions that will make them happy, for instance marriage based on love.
Why is it so essential to be fair to a small minority of people? Well, not only because it’s right, but also, because resistance to it is a public relations nightmare. People have the right to their opinions about gays and whoever else they want to have opinions about, but if those opinions are allowed to dominate the counterjihad, which should be a big tent, we are losing people we need. We don’t just need the 2 percent, but their friends. That’s a lot of people who are going to sit this out or help the other side.
I want to discuss Pastor Terry Jones, the guy who burned the Koran recently. Good for him, not enough people like him. But before the Koran thing, he was also known for harassing the local gay mayor. So gay people, not being very sophisticated politically to begin with, think to themselves, homophobia and Islamophobia go together, it’s all the fault of those right wing fundamentalists. That’s as far as their thought process goes. There are exceptions, but what can you expect? The average IQ is 100, and that simply isn’t enough to understand things at a higher level than, this guy burned the Koran, he harassed the gay mayor, therefore all fundies are my enemies, I’ll vote for the Democrats.
We smarter people do have to help the others understand what’s at stake, and we’re not helping them if we don’t do enough to understand social issues in a more detailed way than just, Obama is using the gays to undermine Christians, therefore gays shouldn’t have rights.
If we leave it there, the ordinary people who are anti-Islam and anti-immigration will resist doing anything about it, if the leaders of the Counterjihad are content to let Terry Jones speak for them.
latté island: I am very self-aware, and I do realize the temptation to compare the situations of women’s suffrage to gay marriage rights. The irony is NOT lost on me. 🙂
I believe that marriage is a religious sacrament between one adult man and one adult woman who both willingly consent to marry for life to raise children together.
Due to the official acceptance of gay marriage, official government forms are being changed from mother and father to partner 1 and partner 2.
I am NOT a partner. I am a wife and mother. Why is it that, when gays are allowed to marry, I am now labeled a partner instead of a wife?!
Regarding polygamy, I believe that can be managed by keeping those people out of this country. The Mormons agreed not to do that a long time ago. If there are still some who do that, that’s not a reason to deny others human rights. At some point, people have to just do what’s right, and if there’s a downside, so be it.
It’s like outlawing alcohol to protect alcoholics. Where do you draw the line? Does everyone have to live so strictly, because of the certainty that some people will go too far?
Oh, I agree with you about the “partner” language, but I don’t think that’s an inevitable feature of including gay marriage, it’s just a lack of style on the part of bureaucrats. I’ll bet anything that wasn’t written by gay people. Let Bruce and Bill write the contracts, it’ll be romantic.
Before I toddle off to bed now – it’s very late here – I will concede that I vacillate back and forth about the issue of gay marriage (versus civil unions which protect gay couples). And, yes, I do know a couple of male gay couples – one with children and one planning to adopt children later. 🙂
“People have the right to their opinions about gays and whoever else they want to have opinions about, but if those opinions are allowed to dominate the counterjihad, which should be a big tent, we are losing people we need.”
This raises an interesting potential dilemma:
First, it is obvious, after a few seconds of thought, that while the still inchoate Anti-Islam Movement (still inchoate in part because many within it tend to call it the “Counterjihad” movement) may require a big tent, it can’t allow simply anyone and everyone in that tent (actual neo-Nazis, for example). Thus, criteria for exclusion do exist, even if they have not been thought through and/or remain in a muddle of incoherence.
Secondly, people who hold opposing views on X can still work together concerning opposition to a common danger Y. However, with this concrete example (gay rights), one or the other side (or both) may refuse to work with the other side.
Thirdly, some people’s conception of the danger of Islam differs from others sufficiently to make their at least long-term cooperation a problem: for example, some in the still inchoate Anti-Islam Movement (including some in this very thread) think that Muslims and their Islam are not the primary danger but are rather tools being used by an even larger, darker danger that throbs as a Macchiavellian tumor within the West itself (and whose dangerous darkness is thought to include subverting society through “liberal” values — including feminism, gay rights, immigration, Hollywood, cable television; etc.). Such Gnostic conspiracy theorists may be useful in limited ways, but also may themselves impede the movement and even may become dangerous not only to the movement, but to Western society in one manner or another.
And so forth.
Hesperado –
You raise some interesting points. To me, it is a question of survival first, and in that respect I’d cooperate with anyone who’d join me in the fight against Islam, and in that concrete situation I couldn’t care less about their credentials. Shooting in the right direction will be my prime criterion.
Talk of the size of tents, secluded enclaves and so on, only indicates that very little is “moving”, so I’ll just stick with calling our gatherings online an “initiative”. But as to your person, do you consider yourself to be part of a movement, inchoate or not?
And yes, I think we need a special topic on cable television, so dangerous and subversive..
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Sagunto,
With a metaphor of a foxhole being shot at, or a house burning down, it is relatively easy to determine that anyone helping with putting out the fire and shooting in the opposite direction is to be accepted without question (other than if they show blatant signs of being a double agent or psychotic in such a way as to do the opposite of helping).
The current phase of this war we are in, however, is considerably more complex; and part of its complexity involves layers and stages of readiness as well as a multitude of spheres of engagement. Last but not least, the complexity involves the fact that unfortunately the “being shot at” or “house on fire” is not so simply verifiable: it is a massively messy and complex phenomenon with a mountain of fudge factors to match the mountain of data we have on our side. (Reducing the complexity to a manageable simplicity may be appealing emotionally, and may seem cogent if framed in some kind of overarching Conspiracy, but it is, as Zenster likes to say, tantamount to “magical thinking”.)
So in this actual situation we are in, there is room to discuss whom we want to ally ourselves with, and why or why not. Personally, I do tend to favor allowing in anyone who says anything approximating anti-Islamic things; my various criticisms of this, that or the other person who is approximately anti-Islam is not meant to exclude them: it is meant to improve their approach and to point out facets of the danger of Islam they may seem to be overlooking or, worse, minimizing or misconstruing.
Thus, to your question to me as to whether I consider myself in the anti-Islam movement, I would answer that anyone who is approximately anti-Islam is already in the movement. Whether and how he goes further toward the realm of expressing that approximate antipathy in various degrees and kinds of activism is another matter (one that could be enormously helped, and harnessed, were the anti-Islam movement an actual organization, rather than the rag-tag larval social process it remains).
Hesperado –
“Part of its complexity involves layers and stages of readiness as well as a multitude of spheres of engagement. [..] it is a massively messy and complex phenomenon with a mountain of fudge factors to match the mountain of data we have on our side.”
You make the CJ-initiative sound almost like rocket science 😉
It will soon be 10 years since 9/11, and many issues have been discussed by now, not once, but many times over. I can’t help but detecting some repetitiveness every now and then, even in the news. We are discussing the minute and intricate details of each other’s worldviews, which can be quite interesting and on occasion even entertaining (remember our peace activist, the Arafat-hugger from Israel?).
But suppose there’d be something like a virtual “workplace” on GoV, a clickable banner that would give access to a forum, where people are invited to totally dedicate themselves to come up with creative answers concerning the “what” (to do), and “how”, then I’d leave the tent immediately and get to work, so to speak.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Egghead: There is ZERO Yin in Islam, and yet Islam has survived and thrived for quite a long time.
Survived? Maybe, in the same way that existence is life but not really “living”. Thrived? That definition really doesn’t apply.
Islam could, by and large, be eradicated in just a few short hours. That is not the hallmark of a thriving culture.
Islasm is so toxic, even to itself, that its stagnation has rendered it totally vulnerable to modern technology.
Whether it be feeling threatened by camera cell phones or at the mercy of every nuclear power on earth, that hardly qualifies as having “thrived”.
As we are so much more often in agreement, I feel obliged to address your protests about the entire “feminization” label.
Previous classical arguments about the Edenic myth of Eve and the apple plus Pandora are understandably offensive. Especially when one considers that Islam used the “crime” of Eve to perpetually subdue women via purdah for all eternity. What rubbish!
That you find the; “pejorative application of the term “feminization of the culture” as a putative reason for the downfall of the West to be offensive and inaccurate”, does not change how women evidence a strong preference for Socialistic states, regardless of who invented the concept.
Without the vote of non-minority American women, Obama would never have been elected to the Oval Office. Sweden, Germany and other European countries evince a strong pro-feminist orientation that equally tends to support Socialism, Political Correctness and Multiculturalism.
Are men entirely exculpated by this? In no way. Yet, there lingers a perception of women — much as with the prevalent “reverse racism” (in reality; just plain “racism”, period) shown by American Blacks — extracting paybacks against men by accepting clearly unfair or imbalanced policies and social trends.
Queen very capably pointed this out in an earlier comment:
For example, lowering firefighter or police examination standards for women and/or certain “minorities” to get the property “diversity” mix. If this results in poorer public services, EVERYONE loses, including the women and “minorities” who are supposed to be helped by this.
The advent of inexpensive, effective oral contraceptives, easy divorce and gender equality by fiat has given women an unprecedented degree of control over their lives and relationships which they have never had before in all history.
Does it mean that women were ready for this level of control and independence? Please keep in mind that nowhere am I arguing as to whether women should or should not have this control but only about if they are prepared to exercise it.
From many appearances, the answer is no. As a man, I cannot tell you how many severely confused women I have met who really, really want to have “it” but don’t have a clue as to what “it” may actually be. As in, “I really don’t know what it is that I want but I sure want it!” The damage done by this cluelessness is beyond profound. Please trust me on this matter.
As a contrast, it is easy to presume that any woman participating here at Gov will have an IQ well in excess of 120 points. This does not apply to the majority of women I am referring to in my prior example and the societal mayhem that results from their indecision or confusion is horrific. I’m hoping that some other male GoV participants might check in with their own comments about my observations.
A more common form of this modern malaise is “having it all”. American women are gradually discovering that total gender equality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Enjoying the same long commutes, job-related stress, heart attack rates and so many other plagues that were once exclusively upon the male house has led more than a few women to conclude that being a mother and housewife — as opposed to superwoman — may not be so bad after all.
Too bad that The Lords of Finance™ have other plans for everyone that include economically raping us to such a point where both spouses must work just to make the house payments but that is another story.
This silence about the unpleasantries of “having it all” is something that women need to overcome if there is to be any expectation of having healthy relationships with men. Unfortunately, far too many women seem willing to put up with the discomfort just so long as they ahold of the whip.
In this same way, nowhere near enough American women are rising up in protest against the vicious and unwarranted deposing of Harvard President, Lawrence Summers, solely because of his honest and truthful recognition of gender differences in the various educational departments and post-university career paths.
This harkens back to my previous observations about the deafening silence of women in general about the horrific misogyny of Islamic shari’a law. From all appearances, it is a silence of convenience in many cases although with respect to Islam such an assessment may not apply. The alternative, however, is rather gruesome. Do women really regard Islam as a way to bring down the West’s White male dominated “system” and, therefore, remain silent about the threat of shari’a creep in order to do so?
Sadly, it simply may be a case that, once endowed with these novel and advantageous entitlements, nobody wants to relinquish them despite the recognizable harm they are doing to all concerned. This closely parallels the way non-producing tax consumers refuse to alter the usurious and ruinous legislation that unfairly deprives tax producers even as it threatens to bring down the entire system.
This takes us back to the same issues of Blacks and gays who benefit so much from the respective judicial iniquities of Affirmative Action and “hate speech” or “hate crime” legislation such that neither are willing to abandon them despite their obviously preferential or discriminatory aspects.
It’s long past tea for women to show some real respect for a “system” that — unlike very many others in all history — has taken great strides (perhaps even too great), towards creating genuine gender equality. If sticking it to men for a change remains such a high priority, prepare for some backlash and, possibly, a real reversal of fortune if Islam manages to wrest the reins from the “system”.
Baron,
You prefaced the discussion with this:
“In the case of women, such issues might include voting, . . . “
Methinks you set this up so that you could have a little fun.
Sagunto, Hesperado, and Zenster: What a complete luxury it is for you that Blogger allows you to post more than three short sentences in a single post!
Hey Hesperado: I used to be able to post longer thoughts until I began to mention RFID chips and the New World Order (NWO)! What do you make of that? Complete co-incidence, I’m sure. Ha! 🙂
berkeley —
Methinks you set this up so that you could have a little fun.
I don’t object to a little fun, not at all. But the seed topic on the other thread prominently included female suffrage, and whether it was a good idea. That’s why I listed it, because I knew it would become part of the discussion.
This may all have been a little too much fun. I don’t know how much fun like this I can take!
Baron: Can you pretty please email Blogger and ask them about the posting problem that is affecting so many of your GoV commenters?
I post using TypePad if that helps.
Due to Blogger refusing to accept comments, I have lost so many time-consuming comments, and it pains me greatly.
Zenster: A plethora of evidence indicates that Islam has indeed survived and thrived to current times. The fact that Islam is a sociological virus that destroys host cultures is irrelevant to the fact that Islam is very successful at identifying and subverting host cultures that invite – rather than fight – Islamic infiltration. On with the Ummah – as Muslims like to promise infidels!
Egghead —
I’m sorry — I’ve never been able to find an email address for Blogger that is read by actual human beings. The last time I had a problem, the only way that was provided for Blogger users to get help was to leave a message on the Google group for Blogger users. Fortunately, the problem eventually fixed itself.
If anybody finds what they believe is a working email address that is read by people rather than bots, please let me know, and I’ll gladly use it to write and ask Egghead’s question.
As a counterpoint to today:
When Muslims used to sail up the coasts of Europe kidnapping entire towns of people – sometimes as the townspeople sat in Sunday church services because it was easy to surround a full church, Muslims would take the Europeans home and force them to convert to Islam – BUT still live as Muslim slaves.
Well, European diplomats would try (and often fail) to ransom their enslaved compatriots, BUT Europeans who had converted to Islam (willingly or not – and Muslims liberally employed torture to enforce conversion) were generally abandoned. Such was the distaste in Europe for all people associated with Islam.
Nowadays, Muslims kidnap European towns in addition to townspeople. Seems successful to me – also a successful modern innovation on past piracy efforts. Now, Muslim piracy is deemed as the practice of Muslim civil rights in Europe – despite the fact that Islam is less than civil to anyone – even Muslims – and, most especially, European infidels.
Zenster: Your depiction of modern women as 1) “extracting paybacks against men,” 2) “sticking it to men,” and 3) “regard[ing] Islam as a way to bring down the West’s White male dominated ‘system'” is dismaying. Argh!
I am a woman who talks to a lot of women, and I have NEVER heard any women speak of the goals that you mention above – in any fashion in any situation.
Most Western women (and men) simply try to get through life without conflict – particularly armed conflict.
In my opinion, women are conflict avoiders because 1) women are generally less physically strong than men, so why would women start a fight that women might lose – especially where rape is a tactic often employed in armed conflict, 2) women bear and raise children who would be threatened by Islamic violence should women speak out against Islam, and 3) women want to protect their sons (daughters, too, if Democrats have their way) who would be sent into war via a draft should women support an armed conflict against Islam.
Sagunto,
There are two distinct problems I think you are confusing:
1) the problem of the AIM (anti-Islam movement) not being effective enough
2) the problem of the West at large continuing to be slow learners along the learning curve about the problem of Islam.
As far #2 goes, that is the problem I was referring to with regard to “complexity” and “layers” etc. That problem will not go away, or become easier, merely through our impatience waving a wand and saying “Enough!”; nor will it go away through our magical re-definition of it as some sinister “globalist” cabal whom we must (and can) fight by donning Three Musketeers masks and sallying forth.
Islam is ALL about conflict – most especially armed conflict – called jihad. Violent tribal-law based Islam effectively exploits the fact that advanced civilizations are full of conflict avoiders who willingly submit to Muslim demands with the VAIN hope to avoid – or at least prolong the commencement of – the forewarned immanent armed conflict with Muslims who LIVE for armed conflict to DIE on behalf of Allah.
P.S. Immanent means inherent. For me, it also means imam-nent. Ha!
Hey Hesperado: If you use Zenster’s label of “magical thinking” about my “New World Order uses violent Islam as a tool” theory, does that make me a witch? Just asking?! Ha!
Witch is just another label used to unfairly (there’s that word again!) blame women for evil in the world. Islam still believes in witches – and persecutes people for being witches. Argh!
Egghead –
“Sagunto, Hesperado, and Zenster: What a complete luxury it is for you that Blogger allows you to post more than three short sentences in a single post!”
Yes, for some reason I seem to fit quite nicely into the NBO (New Blogger Order), should I be worried? Perhaps the Blogger-daimon is more of a “fem-filter” instead of just a spam filter 😉
I’d advise you to always paste from a txt file, but you probably did that already.
Take care.
Hesperado –
Not confusing anything here, but thnx for keeping things in perspective. My last comment had very little to do with “the West at large”. Instead, what I said was that over the years, I have seen a lot of thought put into political arguing, back and forth, but far less, if any, into creative solutions that would help ordinary folk in achieving small victories in their day to day dealings with Muslims, hence my idea of the “CJ workplace”.
I must admit though, that arguing about grand schemes and all remains interesting and on occasion, I still find it worth my while trying to point out to you, for instance, where your MC PC omnipresence-thesis is failing.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Egghead,
I just think the West is healthier than you seem to think. It would be easier if the problem were a secret cabal that we could somehow detach from the West, even though, paradoxically, we impute to it enough power to control the entire West.
One has to wake up from the dream of the conspiracy and see that one’s West is not evil nor controlled by a cabal of evil, and strangely powerful, “Elites”. Only then will we begin to grasp what is going on. An what is going on may be found in our own hearts and minds, since (unless we are singular psycho- or sociopaths) we are not that different from the politically correct multiculturalists.
Baron,
I don’t have the energy to look through all the comments to see if someone else had answered this, but Imust respond to your statement: “But not all moral conclusions. An atheist can find no logical or Darwinian case against genocide, since the extermination of a competing set of alien genes confers a selective advantage on the genotype of one’s own group.”
Please. You are definitely smarter than this. I am an atheist, I can tell you there are many, many reason not to want to “exterminate” a “competing set of genes”. That might work for lions and tigers, but we humans – even we atheists – know the value that can be added to a bloodline from mixing in other genes.
If you look – as Mark Twain once commented upon, and has been confirmed many times since him – at the contribution to the knowledge and culture of the world provided by those of Jewish blood and cultural heritage, you would instantly see the error in your remark. This atheist gentile believes we will never appreciate all we lost when the German government led by Hitler attempted to rid the world of Jews. And that is but one race, one “competing set of genes”. You don’t have to be religious or believe in a Supreme Being to understand that.
I am not a multi-culturalist, and would love to see Islam eradicated if it cannot be reformed into something other than the death cult it has always been. But not through genocide.
Hesperado: The New World Order “cabal” that you underestimate is NOT so secret – just stealthy. 🙂
In the same way that Hitler and his Nazis worked their way up to total mayhem, the New World Order is chip – chip – chipping away at the basic foundations of Western civilization to make the West ready for totalitarian rule.
If you had been alive prior to WWII, would you have dismissed the imminent danger of Hitler and the Nazis as being a “secret cabal”?
The key to future control will be the ownership of RFID chips and the access to goods and services that such chips will provide and deny to all humans.
The “cabal” that controls RFID chips, also controls the world! My bet is the New World Order….
No more war, just eternal human slavery. To be accurate, women need not worry about losing the vote because everyone will lose the vote – much for their own “benefit” of course. 🙂
Egghead: Your depiction of modern women as 1) “extracting paybacks against men,” 2) “sticking it to men,” and 3) “regard[ing] Islam as a way to bring down the West’s White male dominated ‘system'” is dismaying. Argh!
I am a woman who talks to a lot of women, and I have NEVER heard any women speak of the goals that you mention above – in any fashion in any situation.
Evidently, you don’t live in the political and social basket case collectively known as California.
Reg T —
You misunderstand me — I don’t deny that there are other reasons not to want to commit genocide. I only maintain that they cannot be logically derived from the premises that atheists normally acknowledge.
I have had many philosophical and moral discussions with atheists over the years — since I am an unrepentant intellectual, and enjoy the company of other intellectuals, most of my friends are atheists, because that is currently the most popular faith among intellectuals.
If I ask an atheist what the basis of morality is, the answer is generally referred to natural selection — that is, the desire to do “good” is beneficial to one’s gene pool.
However, since different genetic groups are competitors, even within the same species, the extermination of a competing gene pool can benefit one’s own gene pool. Hence there is no Darwin-based argument against genocide as such.
One may oppose genocide because one doesn’t like it and finds it repugnant. But it can’t be opposed based on logic and reason alone.
If you think you can prove me wrong, lay out your premises — which presumably include a physical universe generated ex nihilo, having no deity or creator, and including biological entities that have evolved out of non-living substances — and show me the logical case against genocide. Not that it is simply repugnant or ghastly, but in what way it is wrong.
I’d be interested to see your chain of reasoning.
Sorry, Egghead: you lost me at “chips”.
latté island: Just to set the record straight, this thread was also Zenster’s idea. I only suggested that we skip having an introductory essay.
Thank you, latté island, for spreading the blame … er, I mean, sharing the glory here. In light of all the rancor being expressed about gender, it is worth noting that this thread’s roots have both X and Y genes.
Zenster, you and I are in general agreement about the gay thing, but when you refer to gays, or extremist gays, attacking the family, can you and everyone else be more specific?
I think Egghead covered a lot of the ground I might have in a more succinct manner. As she noted, if gay marriage is officially recognized then it fully legitimizes homosexuality as a cultural construct which would then qualify it for status as curriculum in public schools, something that is already happening. I think homosexual interaction is an entirely adult subject and inappropriate for primary and elementary school course planning.
My own, admittedly, muddled approach to this is that whatever consenting adults want to do behind closed doors is up to them. However, as an example, just because a certain subset of people enjoy SMBD (Sado-Masochism Bondage and Discipline), does that mean it also qualifies for being taught in our public schools? Homosexuality is a sexual choice and may not necessarily qualify as something which should be officially recognized as an entirely separate subset of society. Fair? I’m not sure but I’m even less sure that developing young minds should be exposed to the exceptionally confusing messages that learning about gay culture can deliver in a non-adult framework.
To be quite honest, having grown up in California and seen gay culture in action for many decades, very few gay (or bisexual) people I have met did not have some serious internal personality conflicts going on. Yes, this might be a result of external societal pressure to conform but there could just as easily be some major psycho-pathology at work that continues to make me wonder about just how healthy the gay (or other alternative type) “lifestyle” is or ever will be. That said, I have also known gay couples who had a more stable relationship than many other heterosexual couples I know but they are the exception and not the rule by any stretch of the imagination.
Someone I know predicted that the real upheaval would come when gay divorces became commonplace. Untangling all of those snarled passions and absurdities in public could polarize popular opinion against gays far more than the issue of marriage ever will.
This is why I protest about “hate speech” and “hate crimes”, because they unfairly and unnecessarily confer special status upon ordinary criminal acts which should be prosecuted with equal vigor as with any other similar sort of crime against an individual or group within our society. The upshot is that certain “lifestyles” are granted what may be unwarranted legitimacy in the eyes of the law.
Finally, there remains a societal bottom line in that far fewer gay couples will ever have children that then contribute to social security and maintaining the economic stability of our nation. In an age of shrinking demographics, this becomes an unavoidable issue. Being gay is a genetic box canyon and delegating any portion of our nation’s resources to a segment that simply will never reciprocate with contributions like those made by nuclear families becomes an issue of substance. All of the deductions and benefits granted to heterosexual couples have some remote chance of being repaid by their potential offspring. Nothing of the sort can be said about gay couples. Cold blooded? Yes. Yet, we are in an era where some seriously cold blooded decisions are going to be required of us.
Baron Bodissey: I only maintain that they [reasons not to want to commit genocide] cannot be logically derived from the premises that atheists normally acknowledge.
What about the simple fact that no one can predict with any assurance which race or ethnic group might prove to have the specific genetic traits that confer immunity to HIV/AIDS or, for that matter, even cancer?
Despite having scaled down a lot of my own environmentalist leanings, I still promote conservation of old growth regions due to their having significant bioceutical resources that simply cannot be restarted once they have gone extinct.
The same reasoning and its accompanying logic applies to genocide.
As an Agnostic I have really begun to resent the implication that lack of belief in a supernatural deity specifically prohibits the complete formation of a comprehensive and cohesive moral construct.
Zenster —
As an Agnostic I have really begun to resent the implication that lack of belief in a supernatural deity specifically prohibits the complete formation of a comprehensive and cohesive moral construct.
You, too, are misunderstanding what I say.
Your agnosticism does not prevent you from developing a comprehensive and cohesive moral construct. Not at all. You just can’t do it logically.
There is no logical reason for a gene pool not to exterminate another gene pool which is in direct competition with it in the same environment. This is what happened during the Ustasha genocide against the Serbs in Croatia during WW2: the Croats made a serious, systematic, and quite deliberate attempt to exterminate their Serb competitors, and wiped out about a third of them. There was no logical argument against their attempting this, not from a utilitarian standpoint involving population genetics.
A person who believes in God can find a transcendent moral imperative against genocide and other abominations. But an atheist can call on no external moral force to help organize against what he feels is immoral; hence his morality is irrational and incoherent as far as moral philosophy is concerned.
But I offer fervent thanks to God that all the good, decent atheists and agnostics I know still have a well-functioning moral compass, despite the lack of any basis for it in their faith. They are all my brothers and sisters in this struggle.
Baron wrote:
“This is what happened during the Ustasha genocide against the Serbs in Croatia during WW2: the Croats made a serious, systematic, and quite deliberate attempt to exterminate their Serb competitors, and wiped out about a third of them. There was no logical argument against their attempting this…”
There is also no logical argument (in the same relativist scheme) in favor of their attempting this. I.e., there are no real absolute relativists: all supposed relativists are really absolutists (like the rest of religious mankind). The only difference is that many of them have a more or less complex system of denial about their absolutism. (This is due in part to the historical development of activist atheism in the West, beginning in the 17th century and gaining velocity with each passing century since then — an activism which tended to be propagandistically and ideologically negative in reaction to the ideological structures of the theocracy which they were resisting.)
Baron Bodissey: A person who believes in God can find a transcendent moral imperative against genocide and other abominations. But an atheist can call on no external moral force to help organize against what he feels is immoral; hence his morality is irrational and incoherent as far as moral philosophy is concerned.
I find it curious that someone so admirably meticulous as yourself has rather conspicuously omitted where an Agnostic stands in your previous assessment.
Please elaborate. That is, unless you largely equate Atheism and Agnosticism; something that I find highly unlikely in a person with your abilities of discernment.
Hesperado: According to the non-fiction book Spychips by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre, the BAR CODE people manage the RFID technology. So, whether YOU believe in RFID chips is less relevant than what the experts in product tracking technology believe.
Many major companies throughout the West are implementing RFID chips in amazing and horrifying ways….
Let’s see what Wal-mart is up to:
Wal-Mart’s plan to use smart RFID tags sparks privacy concerns
It’s easy to see what the RFID chip people are working on:
RFID Journal
This link should work: 🙂
RFID Journal
P.S. The Wal-mart article is very misleading in one way: notably, the idea that consumers can easily locate and disable RFID tags. WRONG!
RFID tags can be placed inside the actual product instead of packaging AND can be virtually invisible – as small and flat as one period in the small print on a package.
Dear Egghead,
You do yourself a tremendous disservice by indulging in whatever conspiracy theory it is about RFID chips that has caught your attention to such an unprecedented degree.
Far too much of your other writing is of exceptional cogency whereby it should see its credibility suffer such dilution at the hands of some other less worthy conspiracy obsession.
Are there concerns to be had about RFID technology? Hell yes. Are they of such immediate and looming importance whereby they should dominate yours and our discussion of the counterjihad? Not hardly.
Try this on for size. Way back in the early 1990s, there was federal discussion about putting barcode on all American paper currency.
If that doesn’t give you a case of the full blown heebie-jeebies, nothing will.
Please, just like a stopped clock, Hesperado gets it right every so often. One such instance is in his assigning PC MC to a non-conspiracy laden motive and it merely being a byproduct of hyper-tolerant, universalist overly altruistic and, almost fatally, myopically short-sighted altruism.
Even by your own lights which hold the Law of Parsimony in such justifiable esteem, this explanation beats the snot out of Fjordman’s and everybody else’s Vast-Leftwing-Soros/Trilateral Comission/New World Order led plot.
Not that those bastards aren’t out to impose much of the same tripe upon us; it’s just that there are few ways whereby they could so effectively orchestrate the many disparate and relatively conflicting factors we see into any kind of coordinated front.
Again, for the nonce, please drop the RFID fantasy. Yes, I’m sure there is some dastardly cabal that would like nothing better than to see all of us “chipped” at birth, but they DO NOT and WILL NOT have anywhere the influence you assign to them anytime soon nor in the near future.
Yer Pal,
Zenster
Zenster –
“Please, just like a stopped clock, Hesperado gets it right every so often. One such instance is in his assigning PC MC to a non-conspiracy laden motive and it merely being a byproduct of hyper-tolerant, universalist overly altruistic and, almost fatally, myopically short-sighted altruism.”
That is a gracious compliment to the untiring work of the Hesperado in the service of his PC MC thesis. But there might be more merit to it than you ascribe, besides, I think it is not one of the strong points in the defence of this meme, that the mere word “elites” always seems to cause a reflexive response that immediately and without any further ado, denounces the other party as engaging in some kind of “conspiracy” discourse.
Hesperado –
I think it might be a good idea to have a short topic over here at GoV about your PC MC claims (I realize @Baron, that this might look like another request, like that of Latté’s). I think that there’s much merit in some of your assertions in defence of this meme, but also some very weak points, that I’d like to see it strengthened through discussion.
Take this claim of yours for instance:
“I just think the West is healthier than you seem to think. It would be easier if the problem were a secret cabal that we could somehow detach from the West [..]
One has to wake up from the dream of the conspiracy and see that one’s West is not evil nor controlled by a cabal of evil, and strangely powerful, “Elites”.”
This claim is just what it is, a claim that appeals to logical reasoning, but without much corroboration by any kind of proof or foundation in daily experience. I detect a number of assumptions that are debatable:
– Speaking of elites amounts to “dreaming” and entertaining “conspiracy theories”
– Things would be easier if PC MC was limited to a conspiring “cabal” (why that word, by the way?
– People think that the “elites” could be detached from the West, and then that would be it.
In all of these claims, I think the exact opposite could be argued, in line with concrete evidence and day to day experience.
So, perhaps you could write a short intro delineating the basic tenets of your PC MC thesis, and what I’d like you to add, or maybe I should do that myself in the comments section, is special attention as to why PC MC is so widespread; why ordinary folk all seem to support it (my counter-claim would be that they don’t) and especially, why we would take such a wrong turn, just talking about elites every now and then, and why the problem would be much easier if it really were a problem of just elites (I think that claim is also unwarranted).
I think it would help a lot if you didn’t come up with the “visit my blog” answer, which is commendable enough, for this platform seems more of the right place for some collective work on your thesis.
For the greater good of all, for sure 😉
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Egghead –
Keep up the good work 🙂
Sag.
Zenster —
An agnostic faces the same epistemological problem as the atheist: how to construct a coherent moral philosophy without recourse to the supernatural. A believer in God obviously does not face the same dilemma.
Your moral sense is admirable, but it cannot be logically derived ex nihilo from the premises acknowledged by an atheist. An agnostic normally has to rely on the same premises as an atheist, since he cannot posit the existence of God. Therefore the agnostic faces the same moral task as the atheist: to create moral justifications using Darwinian or other purely utilitarian rationales.
As I said, your moral compass is sound, but it is inherently irrational. And I thank God for that! Rationality in atheism leads to the mass abattoirs that were perfected by the nihilistic ideologies of the 20th century.
Sagunto,
You quoted me —
“I just think the West is healthier than you seem to think. It would be easier if the problem were a secret cabal that we could somehow detach from the West [..]
One has to wake up from the dream of the conspiracy and see that one’s West is not evil nor controlled by a ccabal of evil, and strangely powerful, “Elites”.”
— then wrote:
“I detect a number of assumptions that are debatable:
– Speaking of elites amounts to “dreaming” and entertaining “conspiracy theories” “
Right off the bat, you posit a straw man. My words which you quoted do not say that mere “speaking of elites” amounts to dreaming and entertaining conspiracy theories. My words describe the content of such dreams about conspiracy theories: namely, that the West is evil and controlled by a secret cabal and that this evil control explains the problem of the West’s inability to fight Islam (and even, to some, explains Islam’s threat since it would be manipulated by the evil Western cabal).
When we move from the specific purport of my words to a generic “speaking about elites”, we have to determine how those “elites” are being spoken of, to see whether they fall into the type of Gnostic thought which I was describing. I have never said that mere “speaking of elites” always falls under that category. I have conceded many times that in the West, elites are real and do exert deleterious influence on the West’s ability to manage the problem of Islam. My point has always been that because the West is singularly free, healthy and democratic (and unprecedentedly so compared with all other polities throughout the history of the world), elites can only have influence over a problem like Islam to the extent that the non-elites let them. And, again due to the singularly free, healthy and democratic nature of the modern West, non-elites, in granting elites the amount of influence they do in this regard, are neither sheep nor being amazingly manipulated: the more likely explanation is that the non-elite masses are, in sufficient numbers, themselves sincerely pc mc in this regard concerning the problem of Islam (though not necessarily in all other regards which pc mc affects).
I further find that the resistance many in the AIM have to this explanation seems to indicate a curious alienation from one’s fellow Westerners and from one’s modern Western popular culture, which represents the sun on a sunny day out in the open sky, while these AIM people seem hunched in the dark speculating about how powerful and dark forces are causing the general myopia to the danger of Islam. In doing so, they seem cut off from the massively influential, and normal, habits of heart and mind which have characterized the modern West for generations now and have become dominant and mainstream not through some dastardly Macchiavellian project, but through an organic civilizational process of change in Weltanschauung.
[see next post]
[part 2]
“- Things would be easier if PC MC was limited to a conspiring “cabal” (why that word, by the way?”
The word only is appropriate when people speak of elites manipulating the problem of Islam out of reach of the common man and the normative sociopolitical processes by which major issues are adjudicated.
“- People think that the “elites” could be detached from the West, and then that would be it.”
You here are not grasping what I mean by “detached”. I mean conceptually detached, in the sense that the West remains in the mind salvageable, yet currently in thrall to the evil power and influence of these alites. This is often not a coherent conceptualization, for sometimes the “good West” seems so small — a Saved Remnant in a sense — and the “bad West” so monumental, one wonders whether there is any real West left in these people’s minds. At any rate, your incomplete quotation of my phrase there lopped off that very paradox I was attempting to allude to:
…a secret cabal that we could somehow detach from the West, even though, paradoxically, we impute to it enough power to control the entire West.
“In all of these claims, I think the exact opposite could be argued, in line with concrete evidence and day to day experience.”
I’m not sure what “experience” you are referring to. Nobody has experience of a secret cabal: people have various experiences of Big Government doing this, that and the other annoying or intrusive thing, and then some of those people construct interpretations of what these various experiences mean, which may or may not lead to descriptions that reflect a Gnostic alienation from authority structures whose function becomes one metaphorically akin to, for example, the Pauline “principalities and powers” controlling the cosmos and frustrating the salvation, or escape, of the true believer.
“…why ordinary folk all seem to support it (my counter-claim would be that they don’t)…”
They do and they don’t: i.e., they do about some things, but they don’t about other things. The point is, the pc mc reflex about Ethnic Minorities and therefore about this Ethnic culture Islam has enormous cachet among a broad swath of diverse people throughout the West — more than almost any other issue — including conservatives and ordinary folks as much as Leftists and elites. On other sociopolitical issues, such a demographically diverse swath is not as pronounced.
Baron Bodissey: As I said, your moral compass is sound, but it is inherently irrational. And I thank God for that!
Not a drop of wasted irony in that statement there, good Baron. No, siree!
I still do not believe that you have definitively posited why an Agnostic is incapable of moral surety. There is most clearly such a thing as Right and Wrong. A prime example is how:
RAPE IS ALWAYS WRONG.
Proof: Even if there was only one woman left on the entire earth and humanity’s continued existence relied upon her bearing children; raping her in order to obtain those offspring would be illogical because she could just as easily shun them as objects of her trauma and let them starve, if not kill them outright.
As I pointed out earlier, genocide does not make sense for reasons of its own.
Furthermore ― although this goes too far astray to warrant truly detailed discussion ― Agnostics may retain access to aspects of human spirituality that Atheists could possibly be denying themselves of.
This retention of human spiritualism provides Agnostics with a dimension of positive mysticism ― as opposed to the more frequently employed obfuscatory or negative mysticism that is used to render so much of our world as “unknowable” ― which may not be on offer to Atheists. I’ll ask that this board’s Atheists check in with their own reading of that.
Well, I think that is enough brain twisting for now.
Zenster —
“Rape is always wrong” is a moral statement, but it cannot be logically derived from premises that do not include a transcendent moral order.
From the standpoint of the rapist’s DNA, multiple repeated rapes of conquered women are a positive good, since his genome will thereby be reproduced more widely.
From a political standpoint, if it helps to subdue and cow an enemy population, it is a positive good.
From his personal standpoint, if he enjoys the process it is a positive good.
You cannot find an absolute logical moral argument against rape (or any other repulsive activity, for that matter) without recourse to principles that lie outside a godless physical continuum. It simply can’t be done.
Since belief in God is already illogical, a believer doesn’t labor under the same constraints.
As Walt Whitman said in “Leaves of Grass”:
Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
[…]
Gentlemen! to you the first honors always:
Your facts are useful and real — and yet they are not my dwelling;
(I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.)
Baron Bodissey: From the standpoint of the rapist’s DNA, multiple repeated rapes of conquered women are a positive good, since his genome will thereby be reproduced more widely.
From a political standpoint, if it helps to subdue and cow an enemy population, it is a positive good.
From his personal standpoint, if he enjoys the process it is a positive good.
You left out the part about how rape victims and their spouses tend to hunt down and kill rapists. Short of child murder, rape tends to engender some of the most enduring hostility imaginable. It is worth noting that even hardcore prison populations reserve special treatment for rapists.
Occupying forces that engage in mass rape encounter far more entrenched opposition and lethal resistance.
Finally, any man who is capable of deriving pleasure from the rape of another human being is so morally void that “positive good” no longer pertains to such an individual. They have crossed over into a realm of demonic and diabolic existence that has little to do with life or humanity.
Try watching Oliver Stone’s superb production of Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club” to see what abused women are capable of doing to a husband’s child. I suggest that rapist’s offspring have often received similar treatment throughout much of history. This does not even account for how a traumatized rape victim may no longer be able to render effective childcare even if she wanted to.
You are entitled to reduce this argument down to simple genetics or bare politics but this is the realm of humans and human emotions, which are anything but simple.
As a final example; Native American women made a practice of staking down rapists naked and then using oyster shells to slowly scrape away the entire exposed epidermis of their victim until the man was literally flayed alive but able to survive quite well afterward in ultimate agony for many long hours.
Rape has rightful consequences for those vile enough to engage in it. I find it impossible to confer any genetic, military or evolutionary benefit upon an individual who has discarded such a large portion of their humanity whereby they are capable of justifying, much less practicing, rape on any sort of mass scale. The empty husk that remains of what once was a living person is no longer able to fulfill anything else remotely definable as human.
Muslim men ― who do regard rape in such a positive manner ― are prime examples of how such moral vacuity totally retards both gender and culture alike. We have already seen the hideous burden imposed by consanguineous marriage. Who knows what insanely dark malignancies are spawned by a widespread acceptance of rape by Muslim men.
It is difficult to conceive of a more searing indictment against Islam and Muslim men than their ready acceptance and participation in rape. It is so heinous as to rival Islamic terrorism, if only because of how much more frequently it has been practiced. In reality, it is a direct form of terrorism so there really is no rivalry.
All I know is that these abhorrent aspects of Muslim culture make it very likely that ― should all of Islam be immolated in nuclear fire ― it will be difficult for me to squeeze out a single tear.
Zenster —
I didn’t say that utilitarian arguments couldn’t be made against rape. I merely emphasized that your assertion that “rape is always wrong” cannot be logically supported using atheist or agnostic premises. It is logically untenable.
The same goes for all other stated moral positions. One may argue the pros and cons of them based on utilitarian considerations, but they cannot be absolutely right or absolutely wrong without reference to a moral order that stands outside the continuum.
Your arguments, in effect, consist of waving your hands, raising your voice, and saying with ever-greater volume and vehemence, “IT’S WRONG!”
Well, it is wrong. But it can’t be proven wrong, not given your premises.
Instead of repeating your assertions over and over in lieu of proof, I suggest you use Aristotelian methods of argument. Lay out your premises or postulates clearly and specifically, and then use logical analysis on them carefully in a series of steps to prove your case.
I won’t respond to any more hand-waving — there’s no point.
I totally agree with you about what is right and wrong, but there is no logical basis for it in the premises available to agnosticism. There just isn’t.
Zenster:
You seem to hold very PC, radical Yin feelings about rape. Do you know that for millions of years rape has been pretty common among non-human primates? Or that rape was considered OK in the Bible and in the ancient Hellas (so-called kidnap marriages). In the Old Testament you could abduct a girl from another tribe and the only condition was not to rape her in the first two months.
And let’s not talk about the Greco-Roman world. The Rape of the Sabine Women for example is a corner stone for the culture that begot me, Cesar, and all of us: an episode in the legendary history of Rome in which the first generation of Roman men acquired wives for themselves from the neighboring Sabine families.
@ “As a final example; Native American women made a practice of staking down rapists naked and then using oyster shells to slowly scrape away the entire exposed epidermis of their victim until the man was literally flayed alive but able to survive quite well afterward in ultimate agony for many long hours.”
Zenster:
I am curious who is the real monster here. In another thread you said that you read my book The Return of Quetzalcoatl. If this is true, how could you have forgotten the fact that, before the European conquest of the continent, the Amerindians perpetrated flaying on totally innocent victims? If you really read my book I find it shocking that you missed it. (Also, throughout the continent the Amerindians practiced infanticide and child sacrifice on a gigantic scale—please don’t use them as your moral compass!)
I am not saying that it’s good to rape women in modern times or that I want to turn the clock back to the Old Testament times or even to the Greco-Roman world. But what you say strikes me as extremely confused and inconsistent for the moral standards of a true “agnostic”.
I notice also that Zenster’s attempted arguments against rape often tend to be circular: he cites how people tend to abhor and punish rapists as evidence that rape is wrong; but such a citation begs the question. At best, Zenster’s basis for opposing rape is “well, most people throughout time have opposed it”. That is not a good enough basis, since people throughout history also do bad things (or things one would wish to deem “bad”).
Baron: “…belief in God is already illogical….”
I beg to differ. 🙂
Belief in God is the only way to create a society worth living in – particularly for your particular wife and children. Ensuring that your progeny are members of a stable society increases the chances of your genetic survival for longer than your lifetime.
P.S. Both Muslims and I label Allah as a different entity than God, so everyone here can avoid citing Islam against me. Indeed, Islam proves my point that a society living without God is vicious to women and children.
Zenster: One word: Cassandra. I come from a long line of intuitive thinkers. You’d be amazed! 🙂
All that I ask of you is that BEFORE you dismiss the power and plan of RFID chips being used to control humanity, read the non-fiction book Spychips by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre.
Baron, we do not corporeally exist outside of reality. Ergo, all human value judgments must be made on a utilitarian basis. Not doing so is both irrational and counter-productive.
Your resort to demanding that a Supreme Being is required to establish moral authority is as irrational and arbitrary, if not more so, than any construct I seek to introduce.
Our existence provides indisputable proof that the universe is life oriented. Therefore, whatever controlling set of parameters (e.g., Tao, etc.) that can possibly be conceived of as transcending reality, of standing “outside of the continuum” must be life-oriented as well. If there is to be any definition of “good” it must be that which is in accordance with the universe’s own construction and operative system. The universe is beyond question a benevolent entity or else something so incredibly unlikely and fragile, such as human life, could not possibly exist.
Rape is most clearly not life-oriented. Otherwise, it would be the norm for procreative processes, which it most clearly is not. Continuation of the human species has always depended upon a quasi-benevolent family structure with which rape is not consonant. Nowhere does anyone see any sort of flourishing “rape cult” or “rape-based culture” wherein rape is the primary mode of reproductive intercourse. Much to the contrary, cultures within which rape is a relatively dominant interpersonal feature usually tend to display retrogressive characteristics.
Perpetration of rape is contrary to that life-orientation which is demanded by the universe of surviving individuals in order to perpetuate their own DNA. Ergo, it is against or contrary to reality. Voiding itself of utilitarian aspect also voids itself of moral aspect as morality must ipso facto be life-oriented and reality-based. The universe — and what is consistent with its own operative structure — is a de facto handbook of what is moral and immoral. My arguing that is no different but far less arbitrary — save to the extent that you regard the universe itself to be arbitrary — than adding an entirely unnecessary layer of construct required to posit the existence of a Supreme Being and, by subsequent extension, morality.
As to suggestions that my position on rape is exceedingly yin, the superior (yang) man has no need to commit rape, does not need to initiate violence and eschews such senseless barbarity. Term that as yin if you so desire but you would be exceedingly wrong in doing so.
Sagunto: Thank you for being open-minded. I am grateful! 🙂
Hesperado: Is Islam itself a “secret cabal”?
If so, then it seems that you are determined to “hog” the “secret cabals” all for yourself.
That’s just not FAIR. 🙂
Egghead,
Islam is not a secret cabal in the sense of a putatively evil and dangerously subversive cell for which one has no massive smoking gun evidence. The conquests of Persia, India, Christian Middle East, Christian Africa, Christian Spain and Christian Eastern Europe — coupled with 1,000 years of formal military attacks on the West (resulting in over 200 million massacred and millions more horribly oppressed and tortured and enslaved) (not even counting the resumption of terrorism against the West in the last 50 years escalating with each passing decade) — amount to massively dangerous and subersive behavior which no cabal in history has ever provided.
The fact that I have to point out this monstrously elementary distinction is dismaying.
Hesperado: Methinks I hit a nerve.
Assuming for a moment that we are ALL on the side of human freedom, it would be FAIR of you to admit that I have made a salient point:
An examination of the beginning of Islam indeed reveals that Mohammed employed a “secret cabal” to start Islam. Look how far Mohammed got – without using modern technology!
Even today, after 1,400+ years of destructive behavior and Sharia-complicit imams in plain sight, the majority of the PC MC crowd (most citizens of the goodhearted USA and Europe, according to you) steadfastly denies that the goal of Islam is to conquer the world.
So, why would I be surprised that YOU would ignore an abundance of tangible evidence that the New World Order is using Islam as a tool to achieve its own goal of world domination to be enforced using modern technology – namely RFID chips implanted in humans?
Cabal
VeriChip TV Ad Confirms Critics’ Fears: They Want Everyone Implanted
I’m obliged to observe that this thread has sorely failed to yield anything close to the very-much-needed-accord it once seemed to promise.
That is nothing short of a tragedy.
I will make a final restatement of my position on the rational deduction of a moral code from observable reality in a separate post.
However, I am first obliged to remark upon how objectionable it is that no other Atheists or Agnostics came forward to either assist or productively dispute my own earnest attempts to demonstrate a rational basis for deducing a moral code from extent reality.
I do not know if it is plain cowardice, an inability of others to codify their thoughts or a sudden inarticulateness right when clarity is most needed, but I find it exceedingly disappointing.
Especially so with respect to the usual counter-productive sniping that others seek to pass off as legitimate debate. Again, where is there any significant attempt to seek out some sort of middle ground in all of this?
Zenster,
I am a sort of agnostic too. Or a “panentheist” (nor pantheist) perhaps (classic German idealism)? Whatever, I am definitively not a theist. The Problem of Evil refutes theism. And I do believe that non-theists have a strong platform for moral standards. My own standard is compassion. I know this may sound a little “Yin” but it’s a complex subject for a mere post. Compassion makes me feel pity for the Other, even if the Other is a Muslim, a Somali immigrant or a Jew. So I cannot approve atrocities, torture, or whatever causes extreme suffering. It is false that only theists have strong moral standards.
You should visit other blogs too, it is refreshing. My favorite is Counter-Currents Publishing. Greg Johnson’s latest article there has aroused much support from the nationalists who post in other blogs.
Zenster,
When you are speaking about Islam your sarcasm, wit, and vehemence seem appropriate but on this subject your indignation is a bit overdone. I agree with the Baron both in his view and his statement that you have missed the crucial point. Or I guess it could be that you simply do not agree but you did not directly engage it. In your last round you did male a better argument for yourself but its a teleological one which is great and which also happens to be one of the most powerful arguments for the existence of a god.
Zenster,
I’m an agnostic who believes in a transcendent source of morality. As an agnostic I don’t “know” it, but I nevertheless believe it.
I agree with Baron that the material universe cannot provide such a source, since matter/energy has no moral value or positions, and if there is no transcendent source, “man” is just one more material thing in the universe. His various feelings that seem subjectively moral may feel that way temporarily, but they have no authority to stand as the truth of the moral matter under consideration. In such a scheme, “morals” are just ideas based on feelings, and all of them are various configurations and concatenations of biochemical matter,ultimately. When you have one conglomeration of biochemical matter opposing rape, and another conglomeration of biochemical matter supporting rape, there can obviously be no arbiter over and above the two, if everything relevant to humans is ultimately biochemical matter.
Zenster: As the Buddhists would remind you, perhaps you ask the wrong question when you ask, “Has an agnostic/atheist a GOD nature?”
In honor of the Japanese people:
“The word mu is central to the following well-known Zen Buddhist koan, which is also known as the Mu koan[1]:
“A monk asked Zhaozhou Congshen, a Chinese Zen master (known as Jōshū in Japanese), “Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?” Zhaozhou answered, “Wú” (in Japanese, Mu).
—The Gateless Gate, koan 1, translation by Robert Aitken
“This koan is one of several traditionally used by Rinzai school to initiate students into Zen study, and interpretations of it vary widely. Some earlier Buddhist thinkers maintained that animals did have Buddha nature, others believed that they did not. Zhaozhou’s answer, which literally means that dogs do not have Buddha nature, has been interpreted to mean that such categorical thinking is a delusion, that yes and no are both right and wrong. Alternatively, Yasutani Haku’un of the Sanbo Kyodan maintained that “the koan is not about whether a dog does or does not have a Buddha-nature because everything is Buddha-nature, and either a positive or negative answer is absurd because there is no particular thing called Buddha-nature.
“In his 1974 novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig translated mu as “no thing”, saying that it meant “unask the question”. He offered the example of a computer circuit using the binary numeral system, in effect using mu to represent high impedance:
“For example, it’s stated over and over again that computer circuits exhibit only two states, a voltage for “one” and a voltage for “zero.” That’s silly! Any computer-electronics technician knows otherwise. Try to find a voltage representing one or zero when the power is off! The circuits are in a mu state.
“A kōan is a fundamental part of the history and lore of Zen Buddhism. It consists of a story, dialogue, question, or statement, the meaning of which cannot be understood by rational thinking but may be accessible through intuition.
“The purpose of kōans for a Zen practitioner is to become aware of the difference between himself, his mind, and his beliefs, which influence how he sees the world; and, ultimately, to help him realize his true nature. Once a Zen practitioner becomes aware of his mind as an independent form, the kōan makes sense and the teaching point is realized.”
Source: Mu(negative) and Koan Wikipedia
To wit, I reply to you, Zen-ster: Remember your God nature, and you will remember God. 🙂
I read Kapleu’s The Three Pillars of Zen twice: in 1978 and 2005. Zen Buddhism is the perfect example of a non-theistic religion. Since then I’ve become more and more skeptical that the historical Sidjata Gotama experienced “satori” (“kensho” or illumination); and wrote about it in my blog in Spanish (just as, since I lost my Christian faith, I have become more and more skeptical that the historical Yeshu resuscitated among the death—“form criticism”, “redaction criticism”, etc.—Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus the starting point of these studies).
“Zen Buddhism is the perfect example of a non-theistic religion.”
Yes, I did realize – and yet who could resist referring to Zen when talking with Zen-ster – especially where the mu koan is so relevant to his present dilemma? 🙂
I am very philosophical about who believes in God (and when) because I believe that each soul will come to God in its own time – maybe in this life, maybe in another. 🙂
Machs nix. It is all about your soul growing to perfection over time – and finally reuniting with God. 🙂
Albert Schweitzer, 1915:
“But what is civilization?”
“The essential element in civilization is the ethical perfecting of the individual as well as society. At the same time, every spiritual and every material step forward has significance for civilization. The will to civilization is, then, the universal will to progress that is conscious of the ethical as the highest value. In spite of the great importance we attach to the achievements of science and human prowess, it is obvious that only a humanity that is striving for ethical ends can benefit in full measure from material progress and can overcome the dangers that accompany it……..” “The only possible way out of chaos is for us to adopt a concept of the world based on the ideal of true civilization.””
“The will to civilization is, then, the universal will to progress that…”
That sounds pretty Hegelian. After all, it was 1915.
Yin = advanced civilization (Both interior and exterior improvement are emphasized. Western people attempt to improve themselves as well as society.)
Yang = barbarism (Exterior improvement is emphasized. Muslim people attempt to improve their living conditions at the expense of the living conditions of others.)
Wikipedia on Hegel:
“The finite has to become infinite in order to achieve reality. The idea of the absolute excludes multiplicity so the subjective and objective must achieve synthesis to become whole. This is because, as Hegel suggests by his introduction of the concept of “reality”, what determines itself–rather than depending on its relations to other things for its essential character–is more fully “real” (following the Latin etymology of “real”: more “thing-like”) than what does not. Finite things don’t determine themselves, because, as “finite” things, their essential character is determined by their boundaries, over against other finite things. So, in order to become “real”, they must go beyond their finitude (“finitude is only as a transcending of itself”).”
Talking about Yang/Yin and women’s “rights”, these excerpts from “a conservative from another world” is what I believe:
http://caesartort.blogspot.com/2011/01/anthony-ludovici-conservative-from.html
More Wikipedia on Hegel:
“The result of this argument is that finite and infinite—and, by extension, particular and universal, nature and freedom—don’t face one another as two independent realities, but instead the latter (in each case) is the self-transcending of the former. Rather than stress the distinct singularity of each factor that complements and conflicts with others–without explanation–the relationship between finite and infinite (and particular and universal, and nature and freedom) becomes intelligible as a progressively developing and self-perfecting whole.”
Wikipedia on Hegel on Religion 1:
“Hegel’s thoughts on the person of Jesus Christ stood out from the theologies of the Enlightenment. In his posthumous book, The Christian Religion: Lectures on Philosophy of Religion Part 3, he espouses that, “God is not an abstraction but a concrete God…God, considered in terms of his eternal Idea, has to generate the Son, has to distinguish himself from himself; he is the process of differentiating, namely, love and Spirit”. This means that Jesus as the Son of God is posited by God over against himself as other. Hegel sees both a relational unity and a metaphysical unity between Jesus and God the Father.”
Wikipedia on Hegel on Religion 2:
“To Hegel, Jesus is both divine and Human. Hegel further attests that God (as Jesus) not only died, but “…rather, a reversal takes place: God, that is to say, maintains himself in the process, and the latter is only the death of death. God rises again to life, and thus things are reversed.” Hegel therefore maintains not only the deity of Jesus, but the resurrection as a reality.”
While we’re mentioning Hegel, it would be helpful to read Eric Voegelin’s On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery.
Excerpt, opening paragraph:
When the gods are expelled from the cosmos, they world they have left becomes boring. In the seventeenth century, the ennui explored by Pascal was still the mood of a man who had lost his faith and must protect himself from the blackness of anxiety by divertissements; after the French Revolution, the ennui was recognized by Hegel as the syndrome of an age in history. It had taken a century and a half for the lostness of a world without God to develop from a personal malaise of existence to a social disease.
There is one group, the members of which perhaps bear the greatest responsibility and blame for our current predicament.
The members of this group are the academics, the professors and instructors who teach our young and mold their opinions. These are the people who teach our journalists and our teachers. These are the people who populate the think tanks, are hired by government, advise our governmental officials, appear on media as “experts,” and write
popular books.
In the most prestigious colleges and universities, up to 80 to 90% of the faculty are of the liberal/left political persuasion. Most believe and support PC MC dogma in all its manifestations. They hire according to its tenets and tend to only hire those who share their PC MC beliefs. Like many educated people on the left, they have a tendency to mistrust and dismiss Christianity—but they do like Islam. Their effects upon our society over time have been pervasive and nothing short of catastrophic.
And yet I don’t remember anyone on this blog suggesting the possibility of restricting the voting rights of Academics 🙂
Hesperado –
Would you be willing to consider participation in a topic, sometime in the near future, on your PC MC thesis, if I asked the Baron to provide us with the opportunity? I think the matter important and reckon it would be appreciated by many.
Kind regs from Amsterdam
Yes Sagunto, I would like to participate in such a discussion. I may have to wait until after May 1, due to time constraints (if the participation entails too much time).
Thanks for the invitation.
Hesperado –
Of course, and before anything else, all depends on the Baron/Dymphna consenting to such a special on your PC MC thesis.
But assuming that will be the case, let’s make it a classic, worthwhile topic then, and prepare for an interesting and entertaining start of May 😉
For the public discussion I have in mind, your full online presence, attention and participation would be invaluable, so I’ll wait to “formally” ask the Baron to provide the opportunity.
Thanks and as always, kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
I was just sitting here thinking that the Welfare State essentially parallels polygamy in Islam. In other words, the Welfare State encourages men to have multiple female partners/families.
By assuring men that any progeny produced via any number of girls and women will be supported into adulthood, the Welfare State encourages men to reproduce.
The oft-cited (argh) biological imperative for men to “spread their seed” far and wide might indicate an inherent male stake in the Welfare State culture.(Egghead)
And perhaps the easy removal of men from their families courtesy of easy welfare might present a valid reason for men not to commit to building a family and therefore having a stake in civilisation.
Coming in late to the conversation as usual, but I’ll try and finish reading everything in the next few days.
Basically, when it comes to the “feminisation of Western civ”, I’m a long time reader of both The Spearhead and Roissy, and believe while the content is challenging and their commenters likewise, there is still some truth to be gleaned.
I’m well aware that as a woman who reads both of those I’m a bit of a freak, but “Feminism” has run its course and is now a tool for those who would return us to serfdom.
There are far too many policies that favour the female at the expense of the male. The no fault divorce is one of them.
When one person can walk away from a supposedly binding contract with few repercussions, then the contract is worthless.
When men, moreso than women, are portrayed as buffoons in the media, are legally discriminated against in the job market purely because they are men, then why on earth would we expect them to realise that they are worthwhile inheritors of our totally awesome civilisation?
Being all-inclusive has brought nothing but trouble, and the newspeak of the New Age has clouded minds.
Women are no better nor worse than men. We are all just people, and when we pull together in concert, we can reach the tallest heights ever.
When we are disunited, however, we fall.
I will give a shout out to Queen, by the way, and her comments on introducing islam to feminists. 🙂
When feminists try to tell me about how islam honours women, I just ask them why they think that beating your wife is an honourable thing to do.
4.34 shuts them down every time.
(amusingly enough, the word verification is “yinst”)
“One may oppose genocide because one doesn’t like it and finds it repugnant. But it can’t be opposed based on logic and reason alone.“
Baron, I think you might find this just a little too close to your position for comfort. Have you really never met an atheist who was familiar with the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma or the Golden Rule?
The Golden Rule is why I would have no objection to Israel taking any measure against the Muslim population of the Gaza Strip, without limit. Hamas having declared their intent to kill every Jew, whether in the territory of Israel or elsewhere, they have forfeited any moral right to forebearance; Israel has carte blanche in my book to do whatever is required to eliminate Hamas. It is Hamas which has eliminated the option of “live and let live”, so it is right that those who brought Hamas to power should pay the price.
Zenster, I’ve been much too busy to even get to the end of this fast-moving thread until today. Otherwise I would have had your back.
On another matter, it’s no wonder that Egghead’s comments are blocked. Conspiracy junk must be flagged as spam so often that it must practically beg the filters to catch it. A chip may be the size of a pinhead, but it will require a much larger antenna to interact with the world; that antenna makes it susceptible to e.g. frying with microwaves. Many such chips can also be reprogrammed and all can be spoofed, subverting the system.
Last, I find a lot to agree with in your comment, Nilk.
Queen: this is perfect example of female thinking at work. It is not about taking away your specific right to vote. It is about women in general. Women, in general, cannot generalize. You just proved that. Women in general like sexy over reliable, like security over liberty, like cute over competent. Women in general also think that one counterexample disproves statistics.
There are exceptions. The problem is that they are EXCEPTIONS.
Your arguments – all based on “me, me, me”, and also complete validations of Vox Day’s rule about women’s most passionate arguments always based on how it makes them FEEL – are PERFECT examples of why women SHOULD NOT vote.
“Ditto the mothers of the 11 and 12 year olds being targeted by Muslim rape gangs in Britain. THIS IS A WOMEN’S RIGHTS ISSUE LIKE NO OTHER.
There is no way the multi-culti feminists can blunt this argument.”
Don’t you get it yet?
Feminism is a SUBSET of leftism. When it comes to a conflict between feminism and Islam, feminism gives way, every time.
If you were less inclined to screaming fits at the name “Roissy” this phenomenon might actually make sense to you. In any case, this battle is a losing one, it has been lost every time it has been attempted. But hey, don’t take my word for it, go prove me wrong: turn Islamization around based on feminist arguments.
Ok, having read the rest of this, I see no reason to change what I have said.
Equal rights and equal suffrage is something that got invented a hundred years ago. The corresponding trends regarding growth in government and increasing disfunction are clear. That they are directly causally related is not proven, but it would be foolish to claim there is no connection when we have thousands of years of history of doing it the other way, WITHOUT the specific societal disfunction
I realize how hard this is for modern women to accept. In fact I don’t expect them to. I expect that they will try to preserve the system, will fail – due to the young men being absolutely unmotivated to contribute – and that building the one I advocate will be my children’s and grandchildren’s task. They will have the benefit of seeing the utter failure of the feminist system before them.
And if I am wrong, it costs nobody anything, because the feminists will have won already and we will all be living in a shiny futuro-technomage society of peace and rainbows.
Rollory,
I’ve redacted the insults and profanity in your comment. If you do something like this again, I will delete the comment outright. I don’t have time to play censor.
=======
(wow, the things you find when you stay away from a thread for a week!)
“that WOMEN have done for the cause for YEARS before people like “Rollory” even knew what Islam was all about.”
[insults redacted]
“I’ll continue to fight Islam on my own, but I part company with anyone who wants to take away my right to work, vote, or be an equal citizen in my country. I’ve read this blog for many years, but if this is the way it’s going to go, I’ll continue to go my own way.
Please do NOT go down this route. You will only alienate intelligent women like me who have given our hearts and souls to the counterjihad for years.”
Ok. Here’s the deal. You want things to work your way, MAKE IT HAPPEN.
What you ARE NOT allowed to do is to benefit and champion feminism and then complain that men aren’t responding to the resulting incentives the way you think they should – that is, they aren’t being sufficiently slavish to you. It doesn’t matter how this makes you FEEL. It does not WORK.
My claim is that fighting Islam, just like any other great project, will depend entirely and solely on the Western/European/white men deciding to actually DO it, and that they WILL NOT decide to do so as long as the current female-empowered society remains in place. You can complain about this. You can throw tantrums. You can mount whisper campaigns behind people’s backs. You can take your ball and go home. NONE OF THAT MAKES A [intensifier] BIT OF DIFFERENCE. The only thing that counts is success. If you can stop Islam your way, DO IT. If you are sure you are correct, you should not be afraid of me.
What I am advocating is: one family, one vote, with the patriarch as the executive. This is the traditional, historically sound system. It is the system that has been overthrown over the course of the last century. It is the system that was overthrown in the fading days of the Roman Empire, and in the weak years of the Caliphate before the Mongols, and in every society that is trending toward dissolution and collapse. These things are not random coincidences, nor are they evil conspiracies. They are facts of life and human nature. That they make you FEEL bad does not make them go away.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Hi Engineer-Poet: Before you dismiss RFID chips, read Spychips by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre.
Remember, the BAR CODE people are in charge of RFID chips, so the people who manage tracking believe in RFID chips. I trust that they know more than you. 🙂
There is one group, the members of which perhaps bear the greatest responsibility and blame for our current predicament.
The members of this group are the academics, the professors and instructors who teach our young and mold their opinions. These are the people who teach our journalists and our teachers. These are the people who populate the think tanks, are hired by government, advise our governmental officials, appear on media as “experts,” and write
popular books.
In the most prestigious colleges and universities, up to 80 to 90% of the faculty are of the liberal/left political persuasion. Most believe and support PC MC dogma in all its manifestations. They hire according to its tenets and tend to only hire those who share their PC MC beliefs. Like many educated people on the left, they have a tendency to mistrust and dismiss Christianity—but they do like Islam. Their effects upon American political thought, over time, have been pervasive and nothing short of catastrophic.
And yet no one on this blog has suggested the possibility of restricting the voting rights of Academics 🙂
Please pardon the delay in my response but I felt that Gates of Vienna deserved my best effort at this eternal question. That effort took some three days in total.
Michael Servetus: In your last round you did make a better argument for yourself but it’s a teleological one which is great and which also happens to be one of the most powerful arguments for the existence of a god.
Michael Servetus, I really appreciate your sincere reply. I do not seek to propose a fully teleological argument as one must when arguing the existence of a Supreme Being. There may, indeed, be no absolute or ultimate purpose the existence of this universe.
However, that does not render human life without its own purpose. Call it creating order out of chaos if you will, but I do not believe, nor is it a foregone conclusion, that the universe is not a relatively well-ordered system. Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is so comprehensible. Should that orderliness be the case ― and there is much to suggest such a thing ― then there is little argument against how that pattern of order can provide a schematic for other dynamics of perception or conduct.
The most significant thing is that these percepts can be drawn logically and rationally from empirically observable events in our surrounding universe. They do not require any reliance upon the supernatural or inductive steps in reasoning. Moreover, these percepts in no way preclude the existence of a Supreme Being but neither do they conjure up the conundrum of who designed the Designer.
Given: The universe is, for the most part, benevolent
Given: That benevolence enables the existence of life
Given: Life does not manifest in the absence of energy
Given: The regular and persistent patterns of life are positive
Given: These patterns only emerge as a result of energy flow
Given: These flow patterns may not be an intrinsic property of matter
Given: The dualistic property of energy endows it with polarity
Given: Matter does not readily exhibit a similarly dualistic physical property
Given: Energy exerts an organizational influence upon matter
Given: That organizational property is, at least temporarily, enthalpic
Given: Energy’s enthalpic property tends to self-reinforce
Given: This feedback loop tends to reinforce more positivistic energy
Given: That which benevolently continues life is the most positive
Given: This positivistic energy is a direct manifestation of universal benevolence
Given: Positive energy is of value or worth to non-human and human life
Given: Behavior which increases the flow of positive energy is worthy
Given: Increasing the flow of positive energy is generally beneficial to life
Given: Many values that generally drive life can be mapped onto human existence
Given: Selection of the most utile values forms a catalogue of functional behavior
Given: Adopting functional behavior increases chances of life and overall lifespan
Given: Increasing ones chances of life and lifespan is beneficial to ones DNA
Given: DNA benefits best from benevolent organizations of positive energy flow
Given: Overall quality of life thrives more on benevolent activity than the opposite
Given: Worthy behavior is most conducive to positive energy flow
Given: Worthy behavioral modes that enable functional patterns of life are truisms
Given: These truisms can be aggregated into a value structured catalogue of functional behavior
Given: The prioritization of such a value structured catalog of functional behavior is useful
Given: The most useful and life promoting functional behaviors are components of moral conduct
Ergo: Morals can be derived from consistent and observable patterns of benevolent, universal life-giving energy flow
I welcome critiques of this if they are given in earnest.
Engineer-Poet: Zenster, I’ve been much too busy to even get to the end of this fast-moving thread until today. Otherwise I would have had your back.
Thank you, I appreciate your support. Here’s a grand opportunity to provide a bit more if you see fit to.
Egghead, at your suggestion I looked through some of the links that you have provided.
I agree with you that the prospects envisioned by these RFID promoters are deeply disturbing. The degree with which they tie into apocalyptic scenarios from the Bible almost seem to transcend coincidence.
One conjecture I will draw from such notions as embedding microchips in this nation’s population is that of revolution or civil war. Any attempt to do what you have been alluding to and, otherwise, proposed by these obsessive control freaks masquerading as scientists would constitute more than adequate grounds for a popular uprising.
I hope this balances any appearance of having been dismissive about this technology. It’s dire implications were already quite clear to me when I first commented about this topic. However, in all fairness, you do deserve a fair hearing on the subject and I hope this was something of the sort.
on-my-own-in-berkeley: And yet no one on this blog has suggested the possibility of restricting the voting rights of Academics
I think that once they’ve received their just desserts for such near-universal treason, being able to vote might not even be in question.
Testing
Zenster: Thanks for being open-minded! 🙂
I will look at your moral construct theory later today, and reply back to this thread.
Per RFID chips, the strength of any comment about RFID chips is that the plans are already out in the open in American patents. The companies are clear about commercial plans.
Get a copy of the book Spychips for a more complete story. There are passive and active RFID chips which will be used for different purposes. The passive chips can get the government pretty far in controlling individual access to resources. The active chips can track people anywhere on Earth when implemented via satellites.
Once you are generally aware about RFID chips, then you can tease further plans from news items.
For example, the reason that Obama is determined to force socialized health care onto American citizens (and illegals) is in order to chip us – in due time.
Obama is on record saying how great it would be if everyone had a permanent central location for their medical records. People who would never dream of accepting an implantable RFID chip will take a chip if it is the only way for them and their children to receive “free” medical care “provided” exclusively by the government.
But, in case people decide to hold out, the Dept. of Homeland Security has a regulation on the books that enables POLICE (rather than medical personnel) to enter your house and forcibly vaccinate you. P.S. RFID chips are small enough to be put into shots.
Latte Island,
If you are still reading this thread, I agree with everything you say. I am firmly against affirmative action but I support meritocracy and believe that women should be allowed to express their talent.
I am very put off my misogyny on right wing blogs, and this has caused me to withdraw and stop commenting. I have second thoughts supporting a movement that wants to send me back to the kitchen. (I have a PhD and am a published author; I am also a wife and a mother).
Zenster –
Your reply @Michael Servetus is testimony to such clarity of vision, that it merits quotation in full:
“I really appreciate your sincere reply. I do not seek to propose a fully teleological argument as one must when arguing the existence of a Supreme Being. There may, indeed, be no absolute or ultimate purpose the existence of this universe.
However, that does not render human life without its own purpose. Call it creating order out of chaos if you will, but I do not believe, nor is it a foregone conclusion, that the universe is not a relatively well-ordered system. Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is so comprehensible. Should that orderliness be the case ― and there is much to suggest such a thing ― then there is little argument against how that pattern of order can provide a schematic for other dynamics of perception or conduct.
The most significant thing is that these percepts can be drawn logically and rationally from empirically observable events in our surrounding universe. They do not require any reliance upon the supernatural or inductive steps in reasoning. Moreover, these percepts in no way preclude the existence of a Supreme Being but neither do they conjure up the conundrum of who designed the Designer.”
You have just cogently stated the firm beliefs in Reason that were practised and promoted in medieval Europe. That is, minus the leverage of the Supreme Being of that time, necessary as a precondition now recognized by more and more scholars of the history of science.
I’ll explain this as briefly as possible because I suspect that you’re already knowledgeable in the field. Simply put: yes everything will proceed as you state and the medieval scientists of Europe have stated. The Universe we inhabit displays remarkable order, even “reason”, that can be understood by man, using his rational faculties. There is one thing in demand however, to get this whole display on the road, and that is the truly revolutionary idea that scientific knowledge of the Universe, and unravelling its secrets by means of reasoned investigation, was possible in the first place. That was a unique and singular grand scheme with little precedent. It represented and gave rise to the “miracle of European Civilization” and the birth of science as we know it.
This primordial idea was able to take root in medieval Europe and only there, because of the basic conception that there was a Supreme and basically benevolent Being that had created the Universe according to reasoned and orderly principles. It dispelled the idea that celestial bodies were some sort of gods themselves, or part of some large organism, and so on. This belief extended to humans the capacity to unravel the Universe through the use of their faculties of reasoned thought.
The grand Cathedrals in e.g. Bologna, Florence, Paris and Rome were built as world-class solar observatories stand as structural witnesses to this fundamental, and fundamentally Western, basic Idea.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Egghead, I read systems specifications and device data sheets. I hold a BS in engineering and I’ve held a Federal license related to this for 3/4 of my life. I know what things can do, what they can’t do, and how they can be made to do things other than what the makers intended. That’s what you don’t understand about the bar code group; they are interested in things which are cheap and useful for their intended purposes, and details like guaranteeing security of the system against hacking or hardness against microwave ovens will not be part of their design criteria. Remember, both DVD and HDMI encryption have fallen to hackers.
Sagunto, the consequence of so many grand phenomena of the universe from the sub-atomic to the cosmos being derived from a few essential laws and principles suggests that the “Mind of God” is anything but the capricious, emotional, all-too-human concepts in every major theology of which we know. The rights of [humans] as conceived by the USA’s Founders depend on what humans are, not how they came to be. The validity of scientific knowledge does not depend on alchemy, Aristotelian cosmology, and other preceding notions either.
Hi Engineer-Poet,
Thank you for caring enough to try to provide me with contradictory evidence that RFID chips will be used to rule us all much to our collective and individual human detriment. I would truly like for someone to convince me that humanity will escape this evil. 🙂
With that said, I have read the non-fiction book Spychips and find its thesis and information to be compelling. The authors searched existing patents that have been authorized to huge name-brand companies in order to predict where RFID technology might lead.
I would feel much better if you read or even skimmed Spychips and then offered specific examples where the authors may have erred and/or exaggerated. My library had the book, but you can buy it on Amazon for $6 used.
Egghead, what Engineer Poet seems to be pointing towards is that even some of the most complex and widely employed encryption systems currently in use have already been compromised.
For the “Spychip” RFID network to obtain successful approval, it would have to meet far more stringent encryption criteria than your average rental video.
Human intelligence, in combination with Moore’s Law, literally assures that all but the most difficult to use encryption methods (e.g., one time pad or Vernam cypher), will ever yield an adequate level of security to meet that which will be required for the wide accessibility of critical personal information like medical records or an electronic identity code.
Until the RFID people are able to overcome such a monumental obstacle, they will have a difficult time selling their idea to the government. After all, who would want a system where any basement hacker could reprogram your RFID implant for the price of a new video game?
Hi Zenster and Poet-Engineer, I fully understand RFID chips have both technical limitations and vulnerabilities, but so do many other important instances of modern technology – and yet the modern world still employs those technologies in a variety of situations. For example, it was recently reported that the Chinese (?!) just “hacked” the computer of the Prime Minister of Australia, but presumably the Prime Minister will continue to use computers. 🙂
In any case, RFID chips are going to be placed in every product that you own and then tied TOGETHER to create a net for each human where a wide range of information about every action that you take can be monitored, stored, analyzed, and taxed – and your access to all necessary resources and the price that you pay for resources will be determined by your individual RFID chip profile.
Two current examples of RFID chips that you do or will have are RFID chips in cell phones and cars.
RFID could be in all cell phones by 2010
Passive Tags Track Cars
The Future of RFID Tags in Cars
My prediction is that the use of RFID chips is the way that corrupt New World Order leaders are going to reign in barbaric Western Muslims – after barbaric Western Muslims have served their useful purpose to cause enough mayhem that all Westerners are willing to accept limited human and civil rights (e.g., full body searches in airports) in order to obtain security via totalitarianism.
If you at all think that I am smart, check out Spychips. 🙂
Zenster: Regarding your thesis that agnostics and atheists can rationally deduce a moral code from observable reality and thus independent of God: I would posit that God IS an observable reality, but that would be a circular argument, I suppose. 🙂
In any case, in my reading of your thesis, I detect personification in your use of some words, and it seems to me that personification would be more appropriate in a discussion about God being responsible for establishing a moral code.
Specifically, labeling the universe as benevolent seems to be personification of the Universe (1a) and also teleological (1b, 2).
Definition of benevolent:
1a : marked by or disposed to doing good (a benevolent donor)
1b : organized for the purpose of doing good (a benevolent society)
2 : marked by or suggestive of goodwill (benevolent smiles)
That said, I was absolutely sincere in my previous comment that “Belief in God is the only way to create a society worth living in – particularly for your particular wife and children. Ensuring that your progeny are members of a stable society increases the chances of your genetic survival for longer than your lifetime.”
I believe that my thesis suffices for EITHER God or the “neutral” Universe to deduce a moral code.
1. God option: Show me a godless society worth living in. Indigenous members of godless societies (Muslim, Communist, etc.) recognize the absolute superiority of God-filled societies and attempt to immigrate and stay where possible. Sennels conveys that the only “punishment” that Muslim immigrants fear is deportation from God-filled Western societies. In stark contrast, indigenous members of God-filled societies rarely attempt to immigrate to godless societies. Immigration patterns clearly indicate the inherent worth of God-filled societies.
2. “Neutral” universe option: Show me a society without a moral code worth living in. Societies without a moral code are chaotic rather than stable – and tend to violence and war which threaten long term genetic survival of individual members. Societies with a moral code are more stable – and tend to avoid violence and war which increases the chances of long term genetic survival of individual members. Thus, even godless humans freely choose to live in stable societies that enforce a moral code – a moral code that is, in truth, generally derived from a God-filled society.
Thus, atheists and agnostics may logically follow a moral code that is deduced from a God-filled society. The need for atheists and agnostics to deduce a moral code is irrelevant, in practice, because a God-filled society has already established a moral code sufficient to increase the chances of long term genetic survival of individual members.
The vain (yes this is a pun) desire of atheists and agnostics to deduce a moral code independent of God is persistent as a de facto “proof” of their lack of belief in God and the idea that man can stand apart from the concept that morality is established by God.
Hi Felicie, I think the Roissy fad has died down enough that it’s more pleasant around the right-wing blogs lately.
It occurs to me that when Marine Le Pen saves France, that will enlighten some people.
Egghead, Baron, et al; Feel free to substitute the word “benign” for “benevolent” if that makes it any easier for you to wrap your mind around this idea.
Yeesh.
Here’s some Dutch enlightenment on the issue of Sex, G***nder and Civilization, as seen from the perspective of Dutch women themselves. It is an article about a book by psychologist Ellen de Bruin, “Dutch women don’t get depressed”
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Egghead –
Following up on my previous comment, it gets even better with this original article about the same book by De Bruin, in the NYT. I think you’ll love it.
Some inspiring quotes:
“We have a built-in distrust of central governments and a very high need for, and rates of, personal freedom in every aspect of our lives.”
BINGO!
“A large component of the Dutch woman’s happiness today derives from the importance attributed to the nuclear family – an institution invented by the low countries and whose hold there today is so strong that even gay couples want it. Furthermore, it became customary in the Netherlands much earlier than elsewhere for young people to choose their own spouses – the bidding of Pope Gregory IX in 1234, that people should marry by consent, not parental coercion, was quickly taken to heart in Catholic Holland.”
Double BINGO! “Catholic Holland” oh my..
Sure enough, the book was part parody (though well researched), but the reactions it provoked were telling, especially those in the feminist vein of: Dutch women are lazy parasites, not working full time jobs. Wearing stress and exhaustion like some badge of honour, while all these liberated rat-racers have really added is more serfs to the welfare system, just some extra taxpayers controlled by the state. Women’s lib was all about creating added tax paying dupes, and many bought it as “liberation”. It must be the Progressive way 😉
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
I have encountered legitimate objections to my construct’s use of the term “benevolent”, as that word is suggestive of an agent or agentive volition.
Please reconsider the following edition: (If “benign” is still too agentive for you then please use only its definition as: “Tending to exert a beneficial influence; favorable”.)
Given: The universe is, for the most part, benign
Given: That benign aspect enables the existence of life
Given: Life does not manifest in the absence of energy
Given: The regular and persistent patterns of life are positive
Given: These patterns only emerge as a result of energy flow
Given: These flow patterns may not be an intrinsic property of matter
Given: The dualistic property of energy endows it with polarity
Given: Matter does not readily exhibit a similarly dualistic physical property
Given: Energy exerts an organizational influence upon matter
Given: That organizational property is, at least temporarily, enthalpic
Given: Energy’s enthalpic property tends to self-reinforce
Given: This feedback loop tends to reinforce more positivistic energy
Given: That which benignly continues life is the most positive
Given: This positivistic energy is a direct manifestation of a benign universe
Given: Positive energy is of value or worth to non-human and human life
Given: Behavior which increases the flow of positive energy is worthy
Given: Increasing the flow of positive energy is generally beneficial to life
Given: Many values that generally drive life can be mapped onto human existence
Given: Selection of the most utile values forms a catalogue of functional behavior
Given: Adopting functional behavior increases chances of life and overall lifespan
Given: Increasing ones chances of life and lifespan is beneficial to ones DNA
Given: DNA benefits best from benign organizations of positive energy flow
Given: Overall quality of life thrives more on benign activity than the opposite
Given: Worthy behavior is most conducive to positive energy flow
Given: Worthy behavioral modes that enable functional patterns of life are truisms
Given: These truisms can be aggregated into a value structured catalogue of functional behavior
Given: The prioritization of such a value structured catalog of functional behavior is useful
Given: The most useful and life promoting functional behaviors are components of moral conduct
Ergo: Morals can be derived from consistent and observable patterns of benign, universal energy flow that is conducive to life.
Zenster —
(Part 1)
I don’t have any problem with your logic as such. The issue here is your premise, with which I basically agree: the universe is benevolent (or benign, in the new wording; see Part 2).
But this premise does not lie within the postulates normally recognized by an atheist or an agnostic. Just look at the word “benevolent” — “bene”, good, plus “volent”, from “voluntas”, will. If there is good will, there must be something willing the good. In other words, the concept is necessarily agentive.
A Christian calls that something “God”; a Buddhist calls it by another word. But an atheist or an agnostic cannot even recognize its existence. An agnostic thinks it might exist, but has not yet reached a final judgment. Therefore he cannot use its existence as a premise.
My conclusion is that you are not in fact an agnostic, but a believer. Your belief system just hasn’t formed properly yet into a coherent whole that can be recognized as such by yourself. It is — dare I use the word? — inchoate.
Under the tenets of formal logic, a logician reasons based on premises — “entities” as described by William of Occam — and then follows the rules scrupulously to reach conclusions.
Your premises are not faulty; they are simply unrecognized as such by yourself. That’s a common problem with a lot of arguments nowadays: unacknowledged premises.
Your unrecognized premises include the existence of a benevolent being, force, presence, or consciousness that lies outside the natural order of the physical universe. You can wave your hands all you like, but this is plainly the case. If it’s not plain to you, then there’s probably no point in our arguing it any further.
The logical flaws are there, and they are unavoidable. But the only problem is the unexamined premises. Everything else looks reasonable, as far as I can tell.
(Part 2)
“Benignity” and “benevolence” are synonyms. The new word presents the same problem as the old one: there must be a benign presence of some sort. Benignity and malignity do not exist in the physical world itself.
“Conducive to life” is fine, as long is there is no moral dimension. The universe is obviously conducive to life, because life is here. But there is no inherent value in that, good or evil, if you do not accept as a premise a transcendent moral order.
You simply cannot deduce it from first principles when those principles are restricted to the Big Bang, the laws of physics, and random processes from which biological life emerged.
It can’t be done, not logically. It requires the famous “leap of faith”.
Still it would all be the result of an accident and accidental not purposeful benignity, thus any morality drawn from it would simply be utilitarian and wisely expedient but not absolute and subject to arbitrary change.
I love such paradoxical somewhat Gnostic thinking and cognitive penetration. Zenster is a believer! Lol, probably a high Calvinist. I was thinking amusingly the other night that Zenster and others including the Baron would have been fierce preachers teachers and theologians in another age
Hi Sagunto: I absolutely believe that women should raise their own children.
In my experience, the women that I know would LOVE to stay home with their kids in the main – AND work at meaningful part-time employment during the time that their older kids attend school.
Unfortunately, the work world has NEVER adapted to the needs of the family sandwiched between caring for children and senior relatives.
Ideally, ALL people would work part-time – men and women – but retire far later in life. 🙂
Sagunto, I’m glad to see that Dutch women can have what they want. Since I believe in equal rights, I hope the option to work part time is equally available to men.
To me, there is no such thing as one size fits all feminism. My brand of feminism is permissive, i.e., this or that is available, not, you have to do this. It’s wonderful that Marine Le Pen was allowed to attend law school and become a politician, things that were not available to most women in the past. If Le Pen had preferred to stay home and raise children instead of saving France, that would have been fine from the standpoint of individual rights, maybe not so fine for France.
Zenster, philosophy isn’t my thing, but your idea that morality supports life reminds me of so many exceptions. I’m especially reminded of the image of the Godfather, who dies of old age happily tending his tomato plants.
A few years ago, I saw an HBO movie about a real life godfather, made by his filmmaker son. After the movie, the godfather himself, in his 90’s, sums things up. He said, in heavily accented English, that he had a “good conscience.” He was a radiant person, I would never have taken him for a retired mobster.
I’ll leave this to the philosophers, but maybe health has something to do with power, not morality.
Bonanno: A Godfather’s Story (1999)
Latté –
The typical thing is, that this is the Dutch way, like the statement in the NYT says, fully opposed to state intervention. Not that them politicians have stopped trying to remodel Holland into the depressing situation elsewhere in the West (the book by the psychologist was called “Why Dutch women don’t get depressed”). Strangest thing is that a number of Christian parties, some of which most of us would rather see disappear, have prevented (on the most despicable notions, like the woman’s place in the household, particularly behind the sink, and so on) progressive politicians of all stripes (“left” and “right”) to use state power to seduce – or coerce, women to work.
My main problem that I sometimes have with some feminists is not about their view on women (that’s another problem) but with the fact that oftentimes, as is the case with other special interest groups, they seek to use the power of the state to press their issue.
Women should have equal rights, not because they’re part of a “disadvantaged group” (that’s beside the point), but because as individual human beings, they should have equal rights, or there are no such things as “rights”. Moreover, the welfare state should not be the “redistributor of rights”.
I therefore would like to see feminism “defeminized”, if you know what I mean 😉
I’d also caution people not to follow the Dutch lead. Many times in history, the seeds of deterion where planted, when other nations followed the Dutch example, as Americans did with the Dutch multiculturalism – that worked! – in New Amsterdam, or as the Jews did, following the example of the Dutch (Bataves) revolt against the Flavian Roman Empire (a revolt that succeeded), mentioned in Publius Tacitus’ “Annales” (or was it “Historiae”?).
Hmm, think I really should write a piece on Dutch supremacism one of these days 😉
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
“Show me a godless society worth living in. Indigenous members of godless societies (Muslim, Communist, etc.)“
BZZZT! Thank you for providing proof that a) your conclusion is false (Islam is the ultimate case of religion demanding complete unreasoning devotion to the whims of its concept of God) and b) that your argument is just special pleading for Christianity. You actually argue for humanism, whether you realize it or not.
Jefferson wrote in a letter to Baron von Humboldt, 1813: “History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose.” Islam, with its rejection of reason and criticism for blind obediance, is the ultimate example of this. Catholicism’s centralization of authority in an “infallible” Pope, and the corruption which results from the destruction of accountability, shows that Islam is only different in degree, not in kind.
See the quote from the letter to Spafford for more food for thought.
As for a “benign” universe, the weak anthropic principle states that if the universe were hostile to life we wouldn’t be here to marvel at it. It’s possible to conceive of forms of life to which our universe is hostile, and we have no evidence that they exist (of course, we’ve explored precious little of the universe yet). We do have reason to believe that e.g. silicon-based life does not exist, based on chemistry. There are places (e.g. gas giant planets, the galactic core) and times (early in cosmic evolution, late after G-type stars have all burned out) which are quite hostile to our kind of life too. They may be amenable to other types, though, and it’s easy to see how they might be just as exquisitely adapted to their environments as we are to ours.
The universe is neither benign nor malign. It is indifferent.
Hi Engineer-Poet: Your Ah-ha! moment is anti-climatic – and inaccurate to my main point as expressed in my original post:
Belief in God is the only way to create a society worth living in – particularly for your particular wife and children. Ensuring that your progeny are members of a stable society increases the chances of your genetic survival for longer than your lifetime.
P.S. Both Muslims and I label Allah as a different entity than God, so everyone here can avoid citing Islam against me. Indeed, Islam proves my point that a society living without God is vicious to women and children.
NOTE: You are the person talking about religion. I am talking about God who entirely supersedes religion. Granted, the Western idea of God is a God of Christian conception, but both Catholics and Protestants have influenced Western thought about God that enabled the United States to become “One Nation Under God” because “In God We Trust.” 🙂
Baron Bodissey: “Conducive to life” is fine, as long is there is no moral dimension.
There need not be any moral dimension to life but, without such an aspect, the adjectives “short” and “brutish” start coming into play rather abruptly.
As you have already noted to some degree, I have removed, to the greatest extent possible, any suggestion of agentive influence that might infer willful intervention.
Is it totally impossible to attribute a non-conscious yet “agentive” role to energy itself? If not the energy itself, then, perhaps, those parameters which control events in our physical universe. Towards that end, I will use a familiar example that most readers readily comprehend and serves quite well the purposes needed to maintain my case.
You, yourself, have referred to the concept of Tao often enough whereby it needs no detailed introduction. At its most basic, the Tao refers to an overarching equilibristic arrangement that regulates a construct of energies ― possibly including matter ― blended in their most harmonious and productive state. According to Chinese lore the Tao is unchanging. This would seem to eliminate any candidacy for it having an agentive character.
Simultaneously, the Tao clearly provides a template or schematic for how and in what paths energy will flow. Yet, it is not the energy, nor is it the path. I would liken it to be far more akin to the set of mathematical equations that are frequently used to define physical reality. Examples would be the speed of light, Planck’s constant, the gravitational constant and so forth.
It is absolutely vital to keep in mind that the state of reality described by the Tao is not entirely neutral. It describes a healthy configuration or constellation of energy and matter which then interact to produce the vibrant, productive universe that surrounds us.
Given the nature of that fecund and life-sustaining environment which the Tao produces or guides these physical elements towards, is it impossible ascribe functionality or utility to it? This thread repeatedly mentions an excess of yin. That automatically implies how a balanced degree of yin is both more desirable and, more specifically, healthy.
Health is a very desirable human condition. It can rather easily be ascribed with the term “positive”. To call healthiness “negative” is clearly, not just counter-intuitive, but lacking in functionality. Given that the Tao best describes conditions which promote or facilitate the healthiest configuration of physical and energistic conditions, is it not also possible to declare it as being utile?
Despite the Tao being immaterial, that does not preclude it being utile. Many concepts such as the process of fire starting are essentially immaterial. The flint and striker can sit alongside each other forever without creating any spark being created. The bow, drill and plaque will not generate a calorie of heat without the guiding meme. The meme almost transcends those physical components in utility.
Can we not then describe the Tao as being utile? It demonstrates a balanced and healthy configuration of forces and influences despite being immaterial in and of itself. Moreover, the balanced interplay depicted constitutes a useful frame of reference for behavior with respect to conducting oneself in harmonious interaction.
I’m sure that there are those who are tempted to compare the Tao with God. However, there is a crucial difference. The Tao arises out of the intrinsic interplay of universal physical constants. There is every possibility that the Tao does not so much control them as embody their equilibristic state. The parameters may well create the Tao which then goes on to symbolically represent the most enharmonic state of those factors.
[to be continued]
This is important because no agentive force has been evoked. Energy flowing through the system has organized the system and because those primordial factors were not inimical, a stable manifestation of reality managed to evolve from them.
It is quite possible that the universe we currently inhabit is not its first or only iteration. This reality may have been preceded by a sequence of less successful or imbalanced events whereby the improper value of any number of parameters made that iteration succumb to overwhelming and conflicting forces beyond its ability to overcome.
Many here are aware of how “The Anthropic Coincidences” (recommended reading), demonstrate that shifting any number of different fundamental universal constants by even one millionth of their value will cause our entire universe to summarily wink out of existence.
It is equally, if not more, possible that instead of our universe being a single event of intentional or agentive creation, it is one among an untold number of iterations that was ― in this particular case ― inordinately successful due to a precise and vitally important set of parameters being in exact coordination. What’s more, any number of parallel universes could all be forming at this same instant according to these same laws without any conflict whatsoever.
This explanation of reality requires far less inductive reasoning than any form of existing creation myth. Nor does this construct preclude the existence of a Supreme Being. If anything, it is the clockwork mechanism by which a Deity might best utilize His time in maintaining reality.
Through this construct of reality, I also seek to suggest that the Tao, as an embodiment of energistic principles in their most healthy balance and scheme may serve as a template of functional behavior that is most utile for humans seeking to prolong their lives ― and that of their DNA ― in the most optimal manner.
In this way, empirically observable events in our universe may be reduced into modes of conduct that provide moral guidance.
“Belief in God is the only way to create a society worth living in – particularly for your particular wife and children.
P.S. Both Muslims and I label Allah as a different entity than God“
You don’t understand what special pleading is, do you? You certainly don’t grasp that you’re doing it.
Neither Japan nor China are Christian societies. Arguably, both are worth living in (though not as good in some ways as e.g. mid-20th century USA). Both are doing a much better job of preventing Islam from taking root than the USA. As a matter of fact, it’s the misguided tolerance of Christians which enables Muslims (and masses of third-worlders in general) to colonize the West. Ergo, the Christian concept of God is as much or more of the problem as the Muslim one.
“I am talking about God who entirely supersedes religion.“
You postulate a contradiction. Of course, once you’ve done this in your postulates, you can “prove” anything.
Engineer-Poet: Neither Japan nor China are Christian societies. Arguably, both are worth living in (though not as good in some ways as e.g. mid-20th century USA).
This argument continues to crop up here at GoV and I feel compelled to dispute it at every turn. The qualification of “mid-20th century USA” is a cute twist but does not slither out from under the boot that both China and Japan (to a lesser extent), have had on the neck of their collective populations.
The more common comparison is drawn to modern day Russia and how it is supposedly doing more to preserve its citizens from Islamic colonization. These arguments patently ignore the tremendous number of terrorist attacks and profound losses of life that have occurred on Russian soil. Nor do they ever tend to address how Russia’s oligarchic elite are draining the very lifeblood from that nation in a constant assault upon journalistic free speech and economy-numbing corruption. The death spiral of negative population replacement birth numbers and endemic alcoholism just as often go unmentioned as well.
China, to a much lesser extent, experiences Islamic terrorism. However, the Chinese pay a terrible price for such ostensible safety in the form of this world’s most comprehensive police state, complete with its own Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”. Imagine being stopped by a police officer who can then use a personal data agent to review the last five emails you have sent. Like Russia, China’s Politburo elite continue their Champagne and caviar existence even as they are grudgingly obliged to throw the population a few scraps from their table every so often.
The cost of such “safety” manifests in a thousand deadly ways. They appear as poisoned waterways, death trap coal mines, vehicles with all the crash-worthiness of Tonka toys and a command economy that continues to line the pockets of Sino-plutocrats even as it cannibalizes the world’s industrial base through currency manipulation and institutionalized theft of intellectual property.
Out of the twenty worst polluted cities in our world, sixteen are in China. Its ongoing genocide of female infants proceeds largely unchecked. From among 178 countries rated, Transparency International ranks China as a lowly number 78, superseded by such cesspits of corruption as Rwanda or Ghana and barely nosing ahead of narco-terror state Columbia and the world’s current economic laughingstock, Greece.
I wonder exactly how many of us Americans and Europeans would honestly call China a place “worth living in”.
[to be continued]
Japan is a much more complex issue. Their standard of living is ranked ninth, quality of life at eighth but Japan’s cost of living routinely places as the highest in the entire world. Financial aspects are just the iceberg’s tip. Japan’s culture is extremely racist and xenophobic, making immigration almost impossible and the assimilation of foreigners marginal at best. Conformity is an almost stifling necessity in order to preserve social continuity.
While America may have an alarming high school dropout rate, neither do American parents commit suicide if their child does not pass the SAT tests. Suicide rates are high with groups committing “suicide-by-charcoal” becoming an increasing trend. As Japanese traditions erode there has also been an increase of crimes related to overcrowding. None of this addresses the institutional misogyny and overall low status of women in Japanese culture.
Similar to China, independent thinking, critical analysis and innovation have traditionally been frowned upon with drastic effects upon creativity and individual expression. Like Britain, Japan has extensive CCD camera surveillance now operating in public places and on its highways, all with relatively strong citizen approval.
If these are descriptions of a places “worth living in”, you are welcome to them. For all of its faults, America still has many taken-for-granted freedoms that a lot of other nations have yet to enjoy.
In fact, these freedoms are so taken for granted that we are now in danger of losing them precisely because so many people do not even realize how precious they are. All said and done, being at risk of losing freedoms is a far better place to be in than one of never having had them in the first place.
Engineer-Poet:
She said with a wry grin, “The only “Special Pleading” that I am making here is that you research and help me ascertain the true threat of RFID chips to humanity (over time).”
As pertains to the “Principle of Relevant Difference,” Christians and Muslims are CRYSTAL CLEAR that God and Allah are two different entities with unique theologies, calls to action, and resulting cultures. The vast difference between God and Allah is WHY Allah per Mohammed commands Muslims to either re-vert or eliminate ALL non-believers and apostates in the whole world by any means possible.
To quote Zenster:
“Chinese Proverb: The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.”
Egghead: … “The only “Special Pleading” that I am making here is that you research and help me ascertain the true threat of RFID chips to humanity (over time).”
Egghead, what really needs to be addressed here is not RFID chips, which are but one way ― particularly convenient though it may be ― of monitoring the location, biometric and informational disposition of individuals.
The real issue is ensuring that people who wish to impose this sort of intensive societal control are kept from power.
If it isn’t RFID chips, it will be some other sort of method, most likely nano-technology from all indications.
Those über-nanny state types who adore this sort of Big Brother control need to be discredited and exposed as the Stalinist-type totalitarians that they really are.
You would be far wiser to direct your formidable talents towards that sort of goal than seek to defeat a technology which will definitely enter the marketplace at one level or another, as it already has.
Politicians can be voted out of office. It is far more difficult to dislodge effective technologies. RFID has its purposes and meets them quite well, otherwise it would not be enjoying widespread adoption by the marketplace.
The same cannot be said for elected officials who advocate for “Total Information Awareness“. They must be pruned from our political system root and branch. It is these sort of ultra-elite that pose the greatest danger and not some infant technology.
Hi Zenster: Thanks for your comments about China and Japan. Exceedingly gracious of you!
I also appreciated and considered your input about Total Information Awareness.
As I see it, there are two distinct issues: human tracking and human access. I watched the first few minutes of the link – will enjoy it later – and it seemed to focus on human tracking by referencing I.D. cards and on-street cameras.
Zenster, you’re both bringing up irrelevant examples (Russia) and making a lot of argument over my caveat of “arguably”. Stating the fact that the political situations in China and even Japan aren’t up to USA standards of human rights ignores that Islam and its perpetual state of offense at everything un-Islamic is being used to rachet ours down. Also, “multi-culturalism” and the social maladies it produces are not problems there. Life is certainly worth living in Japan.
If you contrast China and India, the latter has similar levels of pollution but a lot more Islam (and crowding). Life may be more worth living in China (again, arguably).
China vs. Zimbabwe or Egypt? China, no contest. US-educated Chinese are going back to make their fortunes. That says something.
You’re right that we are at risk of losing our freedoms. This gets back to Egghead’s claim that we can’t live without (her concept of) God; it’s that same concept and the mistakes grown from the dogma which lead to our tolerance of the very things that may destroy what we value most. The Christian idea of a charitable and tolerant God is leaving us unable to fight the Islamic concept of Allah.
The reason that I am concerned about RFID chips is their potential to completely control human access to ALL resources.
As I understand it, RFID chips might be used to allow or prevent people to enter or leave buildings and/or roads. Thus, the entire civilized world becomes a prison.
This is WHY I believe that the New World Order is utterly unconcerned about – and indeed totally 100% committed to – forcing mass Islamic immigration on the West.
After 1) indigenous Western citizens have been subdued (i.e., submitted to greatly decreased human and civil rights due to Islamic terrorism and violent crime), and 2) RFID technology has been perfected on endangered animals, pets, prisoners, senior citizens with dementia, children, and soldiers, then the New World Order will simply implant everyone – starting with Muslims – and pull back the leash, declare religion dead in favor or science, and tax the heck out of everyone justified by science – making every human slaves of the state – which is, really, whoever controls the New World Order.
For me, Hesperado’s theory of PC MC is only relevant to explain a limited portion of the thought and behavior of Western-educated masses who are fed a steady societal diet of George Orwell’s doublespeak. I read somewhere that Orwell was aware of the New World Order “plan” and wrote his books to warn the Western masses.
It is unrealistic of Hesperado to think that he (and a few of we) are the only people smart enough to see and understand the danger of Islam. Really, do we all think that much of ourselves – and that little of the most powerful people – who are incredibly competitive, incredibly smart, and have everything to lose if Islam reigns supreme?! Really?!
A much more sensible and believable theory is that the most powerful people in the world are conspiring against the Western masses and democracy – for “their” own good (whose good we shall all see eventually).
After all, as Thomas Jefferson explained – to which Islamic leaders agree and mass Islamic immigration shall prove, “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
Yet, as has been shown time and again, using terrorism and violent crime, our Muslim invaders (ahem citizens) can eliminate infidel democracy with far fewer than 51% of the population.
Hi Engineer-Poet:
“…Egghead’s claim that we can’t live without (her concept of) God….”
Au contraire, clearly humans can and do live without the Western concept of God; however, where the Western concept of God is absent, then human quality (and often duration) of life will be worse.
Given the chance, where will the majority of all immigrants freely chose to live: the God-filled West, Communist Russia or China, Taoist East, or Allah-filled countries?
One expert said that, as much as Palestinians claim to “hate” the United States, the majority of Palestinians would “give their left arm” to live here. Well, looks like they have their big chance now courtesy of Obama….
Engineer-Poet: Life is certainly worth living in Japan.
As with Egghead‘s attempt to separate God and religion, so are you seeking to distinguish between Japan and Japanese culture. It is not an option. Either you recognize the tremendous limitations imposed by such a rigidly structured society or accept that the absence of Islam and terrorism in Japan comes at a very high price.
Russia was mentioned only because it is a preexisting example of another country that has often been thrust forward as an example of this same sort of thing.
If you contrast China and India, the latter has similar levels of pollution but a lot more Islam (and crowding). Life may be more worth living in China (again, arguably).
Ask yourself, is it an argument worth making? All the while, try to remember that it is China (along with Russia), that fuels Islam’s global jihad with weapons, materiel and logistical support.
US-educated Chinese are going back to make their fortunes. That says something.
Other than that we are absolute idiots, what? Those Chinese “fortunes” are made strictly at the leave of that country’s political elite. Those who rise into the upper ranks do so by becoming enemies of the people. There is almost no other way. That says “something” as well.
Even Japan plays a role in all of this by being one of Iran’s larger petroleum importers. Untold trillions of Yen go towards the arming of Hezbollah and Hamas.
It is crucial to keep Russia and China under the magnifying glass. They continue to triangulate against American and Western interests by destabilizing the MME (Muslim Middle East). Tragically, we rise to the challenge instead of simply crippling these MME tyrannies and realigning the entire oil distribution framework.
The Christian idea of a charitable and tolerant God is leaving us unable to fight the Islamic concept of Allah.
I would ask that you qualify such a statement to distinguish between historical Christianity and the perverted, suicidally altruistic lunacy that has risen to supplant it. Try to recall how it was Christian Crusaders that first sallied forth to crush Islam in the first place.
Egghead: A much more sensible and believable theory is that the most powerful people in the world are conspiring against the Western masses and democracy – for “their” own good (whose good we shall all see eventually).
Egghead, you continue to dilute the strength of your message by stirring this conspiracy rubbish into it. In the scenario you cite, the reality is that the world’s corporate elite have increasingly put in place a set of rules and laws that enable them to be foremost among the looters.
That’s it.
No vast New World Order conspiracy.
Just a bunch of tuxedo-clad thugs robbing us with fountain pens instead of six guns. All they need to do is obtain a legal consensus on how to set about it and then it’s every looter for themselves.
As an acrid aside, I am also obliged to note how your ranting about RFIDs does very little to propel the major gist of this thread. It would be far more on topic to address the motivational structure of those Stalinesque bastards who relish the idea of “Total Information Awareness” than to continue squealing about a single technological solution to this issue.
I did my best to demonstrate how people have been led away from the possibility of rationally deriving a moral code from observable reality. If that ― for lack of a better term ― sort of “Taoistic” balance was better recognized and upheld, the destructive feminization (i.e., excessive yin aspect) of modern culture might be held in check to a greater degree.
Zenster: Win some, lose some. 🙂
We ostensibly disagree about the existence of God (mayhaps – Baron posits that you are actually a closeted-from-yourself deist [and I tend to agree – if I got that right?]), the New World Order and its plan for a One World Government (they’re heee-ear….), and RFID chips (being used to stop Muslim aggression in the long term). So what?! Time will tell.
Except, boy do I hate that phrase, “destructive feminization (i.e., excessive yin aspect) of modern culture.” I could do with NEVER hearing that again. You all have practically ruined the concept of the Tao for me – except that I reject your interpretation – as with some of your other ideas.
In any case, live and let live. May the force be with you! You know, the Godly force. 🙂
Deism
Egghead: Except, boy do I hate that phrase, “destructive feminization (i.e., excessive yin aspect) of modern culture.” I could do with NEVER hearing that again.
Then please articulate a well-reasoned response as to why that term is inappropriate and what you would substitute in its stead.
If modern network television isn’t a near-continuous landscape of gays, overly headstrong women and wimped out guys (read: over-feminized), then I don’t know what is. The Home and Garden Network is so effing gay, it even lights up my rarely used gaydar like a Christmas tree.
If America’s Federal government isn’t totally ovulatory with Pelosi and her estrogen laced political hen party calling the shots (read: over-feminized), then please tell me what the Hell is going on.
Like I said, come up with something better and I’ll be happy to use it instead.
Egghead: (mayhaps – Baron posits that you are actually a closeted-from-yourself deist [and I tend to agree – if I got that right?])
You are grasping at straws and it ill suits someone like yourself who can do so much better.
KNOW THYSELF.
In 1711, Alexander Pope wrote a poem entitled ‘An Essay on Man, Epistle II,’ which begins “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man.”[27]
In 1831, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a poem entitled Γνώθι Σεαυτόν, or Gnothi Seauton, (in English ‘Know Thyself’) on the theme of ‘God in thee.’ The poem was an anthem to Emerson’s belief that to ‘know thyself’ meant knowing the God which Emerson felt existed within each person.[28]
In 1832, Samuel T. Coleridge wrote a poem entitled ‘Self Knowledge’ in which the text centers on the Delphic maxim ‘Know Thyself’ beginning, ‘Gnôthi seauton!–and is this the prime And heaven-sprung adage of the olden time!–‘ and ending with ‘Ignore thyself, and strive to know thy God!’ Coleridge’s text references JUVENAL, xi. 27.[29]
Know Thyself
Zenster: Insults aside please. 🙁 Civility should reign. Saying that you believe in God is a COMPLIMENT to you. Only the best of us do! 🙂
The universe is neutral. To posit any type of goodness or positivity also posits intention. Intention indicates the presence of God. 🙂
Did you read about deism? It fits you to a T. 🙂
Many elements of the biosphere, large and small, want to eat us or take our food from us. We’re in a constant state of competition and warfare for our existence. That’s not “benevolence”. We’re a lot better at the competition nowadays (having co-opted e.g. fungi for antibiotics for the microscopic threats and invented guns for megafauna on down), but it hasn’t gone away.
The parts of the universe which are benevolent to humans are mostly human. In other words, your logic supports the conclusion that WE are God, or maybe some strain of pantheism. (If the words “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him” aren’t ringing in your ears, you need to advance your knowledge of philosophy beyond the level of an engineer who hated “humanities” classes because they were tedious.)
Hi Engineer-Poet: I find your comment to be relevant with several jumping off points.
As the Black Death Plague proved, even a microscopic germ (and the rat it rides in on) can change the course of human history. Nothing at all benevolent about the rat, flea, or plague….
Black Death Plague Transmission
With the human-total-stupidity-caused resistance of bacteria to antibiotics, humans are about to re-experience some pretty nasty competition for resources from invisible foes that we blithely assume are long conquered.
Just as germs are ever-present and ready to exploit weakness, so evil (or selfish – if you prefer a more neutral term) humans share that competitive drive.
Thus, it greatly puzzles me that Hesperado is willing and able to identify the absolute evil (or selfishness) in 100% of Muslims over 1,400+ years of Islam – while simultaneously categorically refusing to admit that modern Western leaders might have EQUIVALENT evil (or selfish) motivations to past or present Arab leaders.
The song may be modern, but the idea is old: “Everybody wants to rule the world.”
Egghead: Saying that you believe in God is a COMPLIMENT to you.
Only because you believe in God. If you knew the huge number of “excuses” I could long, long ago have made to myself to suddenly “find” God and all of the opportunities it would have created for me, maybe then you might understand why your statement is so offensive.
For now, I’ll leave out any exploration of how smug, smarmy and exclusive your statement comes off as.
For me to “become” religious without the full force of my personal conviction and true belief in it would make a complete mockery of both my own faith and religion in general.
If I am to become a believer, it will be due to God having spoken to me personally. If God is omnipotent, He can easily find time to speak with me. If He is too busy, all well and fine but he gets no faith from me.
Only the best of us do! 🙂
Smilie or no smilie, intentionally or not, you must be incredibly opaque not to understand the sort of offense that such a statement can give to someone who is sincere about the nature of their quest for enlightenment.
The universe is neutral. To posit any type of goodness or positivity also posits intention. Intention indicates the presence of God. 🙂
Baloney! If the Tao and universe are interchangeable, at least at the parametric level, then there are both ethics and morals which can be extracted from them. That has been my point all along and I continue to maintain it.
I have done my best to withdraw any attribute of intention or agentive aspect regarding the universe. That does not exclude the energy which flows through and that tends to organize the system within which we live.
The organizing effect of that energy has every appearance of being both wholesome and good in its effect upon life and continues to impress upon me a benign and life-giving force that would be most ungracious to call “neutral” or without character.
What Zenster said.
“With the human-total-stupidity-caused resistance of bacteria to antibiotics“
Hogwash. Bacteria and fungi have been locked in chemical warfare since probably before there was multi-cellular life on Earth. Adaptation to antibiotics is natural. What’s stupid is humans knowing about evolution since the late 19th century, but not applying the lessons properly.
Selected, customized and purified antibiotics are a human invention. We didn’t get them because we were blessed by God or touched by His noodly appendage, we got them because someone with enough intelligence noticed the effect of fungus on bacterial growth and pursued the resulting knowledge to a useful result. We are the God we’ve been looking for. We have been all along, we just denied it. Those phenomena which come from will and design… they are almost exclusively ours (giving credit to animals where due), at least on this earth.
Zenster: You do NOT need to find God because you (give the distinct impression that you) already believe in God (with God defined as distinct from religion – but inherent in the universe). You just call God a fancy scientific-sounding name like “benign (kind) and life-giving (creating) force (‘physical power or strength possessed by a living being’)” – a ‘kind creating universally powerful living being’ that you are greatly offended to think is neutral or without character (‘moral or ethical quality; integrity’). 🙂
Zenster: God does indeed speak to people ALL the time – through all sorts of channels – one being nature in all its glory – and another being other people who are quite often inspired by God. 🙂
As with doubting Thomas, God WILL “speak” to you personally in time – perhaps at your passing from this life into the next. But, again, God may “speak” to you through an overall impression via a brilliant white light that will permeate through your soul searching out your goodness to combine with God’s universally good energy.
A really fabulous website that I highly recommend is
Near-Death Experiences and the Afterlife
Under NDE Research Conclusions, in the Religion section, midway down the page, the author talks about atheists who had near-death experiences, but the entire site is great! 🙂
Zenster: For someone who “questions” the existence of God, you are awfully committed to the Tao idea – which has NO more proof than the idea of God. Strange, no? Maybe you were Chinese in another life?! 🙂
In any case, if you are so certain that your philosophical construct is agnostic or atheist in nature, send it along to an atheist site or organization and ask THEIR honest opinion of its relevance.
In any case, perhaps another atheist has already “invented” what you seek to invent and would share it with you.
Engineer-Poet: “We are the God we’ve been looking for.”
Vain much? I read a great article about atheism that posited exactly what you just said – that, without God, atheists invent morality in their own image. Each individual atheist with penultimate vanity posits, “Good is what I think good is.”
Engineer-Poet: Your response to my germ comments seemed unrelated to the point that I was making. Namely, the universe is a very competitive place where humans face a variety of competitors including invisible competitors.
So bacteria and fungi are locked in an eternal chemical battle that pre-existed – and will probably post-date – humans? So what? Humans will use antibiotics until some humans ruin their efficacy for other humans and those humans die.
Clearly, the germs do NOT care. The germs are neutral.
It is humans – and God – who care.
Egghead: You do NOT need to find God because you (give the distinct impression that you) already believe in God …
I will ask that you cease projecting your religiosity upon me. It is a repugnant practice that I have witnessed all too often among believers and plays a distinct role in my continued Agnostic skepticism.
… God defined as distinct from religion
Good luck with that one. Engineer Poet has already taken you to task for making your special pleading about a “God who entirely supersedes religion.”
You just call God a fancy scientific-sounding name like “benign (kind)…
Will you please pay attention? I have gone to great lengths in order to remove agentive or intentional connotations from my language. The word “benign” is used strictly in the sense of being “conducive to life”. Vitamins fall into that category and, it is relatively safe to say, are uncontaminated by any transcendent spiritual agency.
… and life-giving (creating) force (‘physical power or strength possessed by a living being’)…
Ummmm … no. Dirt is “life-giving”, yet it entirely lacks “physical power or strength possessed by a living being”. You continue to project your own belief structure onto mine. PLEASE STOP IT!
– a ‘kind creating universally powerful living being’-
Again, quit with putting words in my mouth. I do not infer any sort of “Gaia” syndrome with respect to the universe, so please refrain from attributing any such action to me.
– that you are greatly offended to think is neutral or without character (‘moral or ethical quality; integrity’).
I am grateful that flowers exist. Does that confer upon them any sort of consciousness?
I am equally grateful for the universes’ life-giving properties yet, do my best to refrain from layering upon it a projection of my own consciousness.
As Montaigne observed:
“Man is quite insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen.”
Egghead: God does indeed speak to people ALL the time – through all sorts of channels – one being nature in all its glory – and another being other people who are quite often inspired by God.
That is your opinion and you are entitled to it. I have been making a marked effort to stay in the realm of the observable. Your choice not to do so seriously erodes your ability to make meaningful contributions to this exchange.
As with doubting Thomas, God WILL “speak” to you personally in time – perhaps at your passing from this life into the next.
Fine, then a deathbed conversion it is.
But, again, God may “speak” to you through an overall impression via a brilliant white light that will permeate through your soul searching out your goodness to combine with God’s universally good energy.
My brain has generated such waves of multi-hued energy many times in the past. If there is such a thing as “God’s universally good energy”, my own good energy merged with it long ago. It is why I do not fear being judged by God at any point in my life. As to God being displeased with my lack of belief, I’ll close with this Bertrand Russell quote:
And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence
Egghead: For someone who “questions” the existence of God, you are awfully committed to the Tao idea …
My proposal of the Tao as a useful model was strictly due to the Baron having used it in numerous previous references he has made with regard to the much discussed “imbalance of yin” that is the topic of this thread.
Please recall that my introduction of it included the following words:
“Towards that end, I will use a familiar example that most readers readily comprehend and serves quite well the purposes needed to maintain my case.”
I could almost as readily have employed a model based upon a subset of parametric universal values and, in fact, made direct reference to them with my link to “The Anthropic Coincidences“.
The Tao has a singular advantage in vividly portraying a universe in simultaneous balance and healthy order. There is little difference between that Taoistic state and one in which the universe is within its parametric tolerances. The Taoistic model is simply more accessible to a larger number of people.
– which has NO more proof than the idea of God.
That is clearly disputable. While the Tao is held as unobservable, its “shadows” are projected into reality much as with Plato’s cave analogy.
You may think that it is an equally simple matter to attribute those projections upon reality to God’s dandy little hand shadow puppet show but, like the subset of universal parametric values, the Tao is far more easily and logically derived than the existence of God.
The Tao may be considered as supra-natural but it is most definitely NOT supernatural. Any postulation of the supernatural requires a far greater leap of inductive thinking than that of the Tao or a subset of universal parametric values.
Maybe you were Chinese in another life?!
I have been told that by more than one native Chinese person. It might have something to do with studying Asian culture for nearly my entire life.
Approaching the 400 mark. C’mon people, you can do it!
Sag
Well, I suppose we must take our victories where we find them and count ourselves as being ahead in the game for nearly a dozen posts by Egghead with not a single murmur about RFID chips.
Zenster –
“Well, I suppose we must take our victories where we find them and count ourselves as being ahead in the game for nearly a dozen posts by Egghead with not a single murmur about RF** chips.”
Forgive me for slightly censoring your quote and thus preventing the “RF”-word from being uttered again. I think Egghead might be teasing a bit about chips and religion. Still like her style though (she’s not the “lecturing” kind) and I think she’s a good sport.
Meanwhile I’m waiting for @Latté to respond to my suggestion about “defeminizing feminism”, which is another way of saying that I’m in favour of universal instead of “equal” rights. Problem with all this “equality”-speak is that it sounds like universalism, but it is always effected through state power and govt. interventionism. I resent and resist that.
In that sense, freedom might very well prove to be totally different from “liberation”. This is a general point about language and action, that I learned when interviewing Patrick Moore as a young biology student during a congress about genetic modification, still called “manipulation” back then (he had already left Greenpeace, btw): his point was that progressives – being at war with (human) nature – will always use “synthetic language” which mimics that of common folk, injecting into the natural sentiments of public discourse a political agens, known as hubristin (TM). We talk about nature, they say “environment”. We think of growth, they push “progress” into our minds. We dream of a free society, they speak of “liberation”.
I’ve tried to convey the real life consequences of this progressive linguistic mimicry to Hesperado, where it might pose some problems for his pristine but overly schematic PC MC thesis (politicians/power elites sharing same convictions as general public, i.e. we are guilty ourselves. Bit too Calvinistic toward the general public and apologetic of political elites for my taste), but it seems I might have failed, for now.
The tradition of universal natural rights has endured sustained attacks from all sides, particularly from those “liberators” and secular saviours who – for various doctrinal reasons, have fallen for the idea of the “common good” and the “Religion of Humanity”. I think Egghead would understand my point of view, not only with regard to feminism, but on many issues concerning universal “rights”, being that it is derived from Natural Law philosophy (which springs from many sources, combined in the great medieval Christian tradition, that was still firmly rooted in Roman and Greek antiquity)
Also warming up for an article on the much overlooked evils of “Dutch supremacism”, where I’ll try and trace the roots of feminism, multiculturalism, free market capitalism and religious toleration all the way back to its Dutch origins in Amsterdam, old and “New”. The historical evils that followed in the wake of this Dutch conspiracy will make that of the you-know-what chip look like a picnic in the Vondelpark 😉
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Sagunto: Meanwhile I’m waiting for @Latté to respond to my suggestion about “defeminizing feminism”, which is another way of saying that I’m in favour of universal instead of “equal” rights. Problem with all this “equality”-speak is that it sounds like universalism, but it is always effected through state power and govt. interventionism. I resent and resist that.
It was immediately apparent that your approach towards “universal rights” had nothing in common with the Leftist Trojan horse of “Universal Human Rights”.
I, too, have long maintained (since high school days), that when men learn which corner of a baby to pick it up by and women figure out which end of a screwdriver to grab, we’ll all be a lot better off.
This was my own way of saying that “women’s rights” meant nothing if they did not display identical concern for the rights of men.
Of course, the rise of feminism somehow neglected to remember this key principle and the insane imbalance of legal preference that modern women enjoy is a prime mover in the destruction of Western civilization.
Women alone are not wholly responsible for this in that many men had to buy into this sham for it to succeed. But succeed it has and the destructiveness of it is as wholesale as it is widespread.
A prime example is the silence of modern feminists about shari’a law and Islam. A direct reflection of this is their culpability in the election of Islamophile Obama.
The empowerment of women to make these almost suicidally bad choices is something that needs careful examination.
A comparable issue, though much less fair in some respects, would be how inexpensive and widely distributed oral contraceptives have enabled women to avoid the normal repercussions of dallying with dangerous types of men.
This has seen the rise of an entirely unwholesome fascination by women with “edgy” or “rebel” types who just as often are only inches away from being thugs and lowlifes if they are not, in fact, already so.
The concomitant rejection of decent mates by these empowered women has propelled an existing societal tailspin into a death spiral of divorce, spousal abuse and countless other toxins that are fatal to a functional culture.
Sagunto: Your sense of humor is what I like best about you. 🙂
Zenster: I saw a welcome glimmer of humor in your comment about my not mentioning RFID chips recently. Humor is much better…. 🙂
All: I post ideas in multiple posts because I labor under a severe word limit imposed by the evil cabal at Blogger. You should have to post Haiku-length comments and see how fun it is. NOT!
Sagunto: I do indeed like to use a teasing tone (which is much more fun when people tease back), but I also “generally” stand by the content of my comments (that should give me wiggle room). 🙂
Zenster: I repeat, “If you are so certain that your philosophical construct is agnostic or atheist in nature, send it along to an atheist site or organization and ask THEIR honest opinion of its relevance.”
Civilization
Cannot spring from destructive
Feminization
Thnx Eggy –
Beware though, the following will be an attempt at dispensing some dead-serious advice to you. And I’ll take you through it, step by step.
Advice on how to exorcize the malevolent Blogger-daimon
Step 1)
Write your comment in notepad
Step 2)
Visit the GoV article as it appears on the page, do not click on the article’s title link or the “read more” link.
Step 3)
Click on “comments” (indicated by number) right away and go to the Blogger pop-up.
Step 4)
Assuming you’re not logged in yet, send a test preview of a few random characters and sign in.
Step 5)
It might be that the Blogger ghost starts with obstructive actions now. No daimon likes to be driven out. Just click the cross and make the whole thing vanish.
Step 6)
Switch back (Alt + Tab) to the GoV page and make the Blogger comment screen pop-up again, like in step 3.
Step 7)
You will notice that you’re signed in now. Paste your comment into the window and click “preview”. Most of the time, the Blogger bug accepts defeat already and you can publish.
Step 8)
If not, just temporarily accept that the Blogger-bug is only weakened. Try again the other day, and you’ll see that in the end, all opposition will melt away. Except for those comments with embedded links. These will be gladly 😉 scooped up by the Baron and liberated from the mandatory spam-“filter” anytime.
Good luck!
Sag.
Zenster: Since the beginning of human relations, men have exercised an near-exclusive male personal and legal prerogative to engage in spousal and child abuse – physical and sexual abuse with far worse consequences when women had ZERO voting and educational rights or options to divorce and work outside the home.
In point of fact, men have always had the option to de facto divorce women because men exercised near total control of money. Through history, men who took mistresses were practicing de facto polygamy or divorce to the great detriment of their families.
For women: Voting secures women the right to divorce, and divorce keeps men honest because women can leave abusive men (who often try to maim and/or kill them anyway) – although the children are generally stuck in bad situations due to an INSANE idea of progressive social services that guarantees a father’s right to see children over his children’s right to safety.
Here I reference the case of the father who molested and raped his daughter who became pregnant and bore a girl child. The father/grandfather served his time in prison for the molestation/rape and, once free, attempted to secure unsupervised visitation with his new daughter/granddaughter.
Of course, the state argued on behalf of the father who had served his time for his crime and “deserved” that chance to “know” his daughter/granddaughter. ARGH!
“Led by the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the dry forces had triumphed by linking Prohibition to a variety of Progressive era social causes. Proponents of Prohibition included many women reformers who were concerned about alcohol’s link to wife beating and child abuse and industrialists, such as Henry Ford, who were concerned about the impact of drinking on labor productivity.”
Prohibition (1920s)
Sagunto: Thanks for the tip. I will try it much later tonight. I am out for now. 🙂
Sagunto, I didn’t realize I was supposed to reply. I was in general agreement about defeminizing feminism, if I understand that expression correctly. Do you mean, to remove the identity politics part of rights? Sign me up, or rather, I’ve never had any other position.
Also, even though I agree that men and women are different, on average, and have different abilities, that doesn’t mean that outliers should be prevented from using their talents. If a few women are called to be electrical engineers instead of nurses, and if a few men would rather stay home with the kids than climb the corporate ladder, they should absolutely do so. Not only is it better for people to have access to paths that suit them, the people they serve (children, clients) are also happier, because love is both more fun and more effective than coercion. (I’m only referring to work and family life, not war, in which case, coercion can be more appropriate.)
Oh, and I’ll briefly point out that the invention of the Pill wasn’t the only cause of some women’s irresponsible behavior nowadays. The elites of many societies throughout history have been as wild as people are today. It’s just trickled down to the masses more lately.
I’m not a social historian, so I’m not the right person to go into detail about all this, but I have to object to this “The Pill caused everything” meme, because even knowing a little history and literature, I can see it’s as true as “The Jews caused everything.”
Read Dangerous Liaisons. Read anything–it’s all there. They didn’t have the Pill, but lots of people were making mistakes and getting rid of the kids in ways that were a lot more morally questionable than the Pill, which I don’t have a problem with morally, except that it’s a health hazard for many women and was marketed irresponsibly.
Just recently, I learned the Pill is still prescribed by some doctors to very young girls, as young as twelve, not for contraception, but to make their period more regular. So, why blame women for using the pill? The medical establishment is pushing it on children for no particular reason.
latté island: Oh, and I’ll briefly point out that the invention of the Pill wasn’t the only cause of some women’s irresponsible behavior nowadays.
Please note the all important qualifier contained in my introduction of that example:
“A comparable issue, though much less fair in some respects, would be how inexpensive and widely distributed oral contraceptives have enabled women to avoid the normal repercussions of dallying with dangerous types of men.”
Also, in the realm of better late than never, I would like to echo Engineer Poet‘s applause of Nilk‘s observations in comments #62 & 63.
Zenster:
Good on you
for your haiku:
Civilization
Cannot spring from destructive
Feminization
Here’s my reply:
Civilization
Springs from the well of peaceful
Feminization
Female nature is
Stronger to nurture than to
Injure weak others
Male war destroys man
And child who cry out, “Mother!”
To tend the wounded
Birth, death, in-between
Life eternal given
By women to men
Feminization
Unappreciated by[buy,bye]
Uncivilized men
🙂
Sagunto: Thanks! I tried your method, but Blogger is resisting….
I will keep trying. 🙂
Egghead, not all men are disconnected from their internal yin counterpart.
I’m so in touch with my feminine side that it filed a restraining order against me! [rimshot]
Sagunto: Thanks so much! Persistence paid off for me. Your method has worked, and I am free to ramble at length again! 🙂
Baron: If you are following this thread, I have seen MANY of your commenters complain about the Blogger bug. So, you might want to let your readers know that Sagunto’s Blogger bug fix WORKS.
As I recall, you have to save your initial comment somewhere because you will lose it when you exit the initial preview screen. Then, try to submit the comment with the same process once or twice, and Blogger will be magically fixed. After Blogger is fixed, you do not need to preview anymore. Just submit the full-length comment.
Baron: Oops! I spoke too soon. Blogger is giving me trouble again and refuses to accept a preview for a longer statement. In other words, Blogger is giving me the same error message to see a preview as to post a comment. I will keep you posted on my progress.
Zenster: Did you mean badum-CHING – or I-Ching? Ha! 🙂
According to the Urban Dictionary, a rimshot is “that badum-CHING thing they do on a drum after a joke.”
Now, the interesting thing about the I-Ching is that – drumroll please – the Chinese believe that the I-Ching was divinely inspired!
“Fu Xi or Fu Hsi (Chinese: 伏羲; pinyin: fúxī; aka Paoxi (simplified Chinese: 庖牺; traditional Chinese: 庖犧; pinyin: páoxī)), mid 29th century BCE, was the first of the Three Sovereigns (三皇 sānhuáng) of ancient China. He is a culture hero reputed to be the inventor of writing, fishing, and trapping.”
“According to legend, the land was swept by a great flood and only Fu Xi and his sister Nüwa survived. They retired to Kunlun Mountain where they prayed for a sign from the Emperor of Heaven. The divine being approved their union and the siblings set about procreating the human race.”
“It was said that in order to speed up the procreation of humans, Fu Xi and Nüwa found an additional way by using clay to create human figures, and with the power divine being entrusted to them, they made the clay figures to come alive.[1]”
“Traditionally, Fu Xi is considered the originator of the I Ching (also known as the Yi Jing or Zhou Yi), which work is attributed to his reading of the He Map (or the Yellow River Map). According to this tradition, Fu Xi had the arrangement of the trigrams (八卦 bāgùa) of the I Ching revealed to him supernaturally.”
From Wikipedia
“In Chinese cosmology, Yin and Yang (see a picture) are two opposite but complementary principles that regulate the functioning of the cosmos. The repeated alternation of Yin and Yang provides the energy necessary for the cosmos to sustain itself. Their continuous joining and separation is at the origin of the rise and the disappearance of all phenomena.”
by Fabrizio Pregadio
“According to a famous statement, which is found in one of the appendixes to the Book of Changes (Yijing), “one Yin and one Yang, this is the Dao.” This sentence refers to the Dao that first determines itself as Unity (or the One), and then gives birth to the two complementary principles. As each of these stages generates the next one, Yin and Yang are ultimately contained within the Dao itself. At the same time, the phrase “one Yin and one Yang, this is the Dao” alludes to the continuous alternation of Yin and Yang within the cosmos. When one of the two principles prevails, the other yields, but once one of them has reached the height of its development, it begins to recede–and in that very moment, the other principle begins its ascent. This mode of operation is especially visible in the time cycles of the day (alternation of daytime and nighttime) and of the year (alternation of the four seasons).”
by Fabrizio Pregadio
“There is a perception (especially in the West) that yin and yang correspond to evil and good. However, Taoist philosophy generally discounts good/bad distinctions and other dichotomous moral judgments, in preference to the idea of balance. Confucianism (most notably the philosophy of Dong Zhongshu, c. the 2nd century BCE) did attach a moral dimension to the idea of yin and yang, but the modern sense of the term largely stems from Buddhist adaptations of Taoist philosophy.[2]”
From Wikipedia
“It is impossible to talk about yin or yang without some reference to the opposite, since yin and yang are bound together as parts of a mutual whole (i.e. you cannot have the back of a hand without the front). A way to illustrate this idea is to postulate the notion of a race with only men or only women; this race would disappear in a single generation. Yet, men and women together create new generations that allow the race they mutually create (and mutually come from) to survive. The interaction of the two gives birth to things.[3] Yin and yang transform each other: like an undertow in the ocean, every advance is complemented by a retreat, and every rise transforms into a fall. Thus, a seed will sprout from the earth and grow upwards towards the sky – an intrinsically yang movement. Then, when it reaches its full potential height, it will fall.”
From Wikipedia
Zenster: My primary, and I think relevant to the spirit of the Dao, objection to the term DESTRUCTIVE feminization is that, in clearly being a pejorative term, the term contracts the message of the Dao which is that life ebbs and flows in HARMONY.
However, the men on this site who quote the Yin and Yang of the Dao and predict (and await!) the fall of feminism give the impression that those same men would like to “punish” women for their role in accepting Islam into the West.
This characterization of women is dismaying because it relies on several faulty premises including 1) a fundamental misunderstanding of Yin and Yang and the Dao (and I dare you to ask a Buddhist expert about the Dao), 2) the idea that women are MORE responsible than men for encroaching Islam whereas HUMANS (especially Muslims!) are responsible in totem, 3) women exercise MORE power in politics and culture than men (other than a few recent figureheads, seriously, folks?!), and 4) that women would deserve to be “punished” by taking away their natural rights (whereas men who have exclusively screwed things up from the beginning of time until now would deserve to “punish” the women). Yeesh!
The issue of transexuals being mainstreamed in showers, dormitories & restrooms is a red herring. It’s not so much an issue of, the gays and trannies are forcing us to… as, a specific case of the general problem of lack of freedom of association.
First, I’ll state that I don’t want to share any private space with any transgendered person, whether MTF or FTM. I do, however, think free adults have the right to choose their gender. Sometimes people’s rights are in conflict. This is not specific to gay issues, it’s a universal issue. It’s similar to other zoning, land use and property rights issues.
Here are some examples of similar issues, where the parties are different. For instance: as a woman, I am often put off by women who bring their male children into women’s restrooms. Of course it’s necessary, to protect the boys from the predators they could meet if they go alone to the men’s room. That’s why I’ve never complained. Women have no choice, but to allow their male children to violate the privacy of women using restrooms.
Occasionally, the boys are so old, that they are obviously getting off on it. I feel as if I’m being used as sex education for boys at the awkward age when they are starting to have sexual curiousity about women, but are still not safe by themselves in the men’s room.
You mentioned college dormitories. Well, there was that recent case where that gay freshman was videotaped making out in his college dorm, by his straight roommate. He jumped off a bridge.
This is not an example of why straight people shouldn’t be allowed in college dorms. It’s an example of what can happen to anyone, for any reason, when they don’t have privacy and freedom of association.
The roommate thing is something I don’t understand. Even among straight people or gay people, one roommate may be noisier than the other. Whenever you have people sharing space who haven’t picked each other, one will be at a disadvantage.
To use transexuals as an example of this general principle, and then forget the principle, but only get worked up about the trannies, is some kind of bad rhetoric there’s probably a name for, it’s so common. (Scapegoating?)
I don’t have a solution to the tranny problem, but it would help in every case, if society were more careful about privacy rights in general.
Hey, what about nursing homes and hospitals? Can anyone top this one: a friend of mine was dying of cancer in a hospice, and his roommate blasted the tv constantly. I complained, but the nurses sided with the offender, because he was big and black.
Does this mean black people shouldn’t be allowed in nursing homes? No, it means people in nursing homes have the right to privacy, across the board. Same as the tranny thing. It’s a very big issue.
latté island: I understand your opinion, but the cart blanche issuance of “rights” to gays and lesbians sets a clear precedent for transsexuals as everyone – pro and con – is all too aware.
In fact, it is my understanding that gay groups have instructed transsexuals to stay low-key about their “rights” until gays achieve their “rights” – and then….
In any case, I agree with you that the rights to privacy and freedom of association would help mitigate issues.
However, now that gays (and friends) are a “protected” class, it will be hard to deflect claims of sexual discrimination and human rights violations when “normal” people claim their right to pick their own roommates and associate with other “normal” people.
“Whenever you have people sharing space who haven’t picked each other, one will be at a disadvantage.”
In my opinion, there is a much greater disadvantage when young college students – who are often required to live in campus housing for at least one year – are forced to share dorm rooms and bathrooms against their will with a gay, lesbian, or transsexual person.
By the way, “family” restrooms (now found at Target and Wal-Mart) are a great solution to help solve the problem of mothers bringing older boys into the ladies restroom. 🙂
Egghead, why do you describe the dilemma of “college students” who are forced to share with gay, etc.? Are you assuming that all college students are straight, and also that in the case of gay/straight room assignments, the straight person is the one who is at a disadvantage?
Do you think the late Tyler Clementi had a right to attend college and not be spied on and publicly humiliated by his roommate?
Could this type of situation be avoided by giving choice to all students, straight,gay and trans?
Why put the blame on one type of person, when in fact, every type of sexual orientation, music preference, attitude toward doing chores, etc. etc. can be unfair to other people.
I think it would be more honest on your part to state upfront that you want gay and trans people to not have rights to be in public, just because. Hey, that’s kind of how I feel about black people, but I know that won’t hold up logically, so I always take responsibility for my views and say, black people have rights, but I also have the right to avoid them.
This is the honest way to deal with prejudice. Not to pretend to be logical, when anyone reading this exchange can see that reason is on my side. You only have the right to avoid gay people, not take away their rights, just because you don’t like them.
Haven’t I made it clear I also want to avoid trannies? But I don’t kid myself that they don’t have rights. They pay taxes and are citizens, the ones who do and are, so they do have the right to go to college and vote and everything, and even to go to the bathroom in public buildings.
The way to solve this problem is for everyone to be honest. Whether the solution is to divide facilities into three categories instead of two, or some other idea, I don’t know, but I do know that discriminating against people because their personality and appearance is different, isn’t sustainable in a free society.
To sum up, people in the CJ need to consider how some of their arguments would sound to uncommitted potential allies. If people here are not ready to see that there is a middle ground between rights and affirmative action, that’s what will make 50% of the West sit this out.
Latté –
Thnx for the clarification and summary. You wrote:
“If people here are not ready to see that there is a middle ground between rights and affirmative action [..]”
This contrasts unfavourably with what you said earlier in your reply to me, when I pointed to universal individual instead of “equal” group rights.
If one truly supports universal natural and individual rights, then it is easy to see that there’s no middle ground here. This is about the sanctity and sovereignty of the person, nothing else.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Sagunto, you’re right. When I wrote “middle ground,” it was a bit hazy. This isn’t the first time you’ve been my copy editor.
Latté –
🙂
Let me try to rise above that rather depressing level of editor.
You’d have to totally reinvent “affirmative action” to find any semblance of ehm.. common ground with Natural Law philosophy and universal rights. The affirmative action as it is known among the general public was never about that, but always about group rights, enforced by state intervention.
Sag.
latté island: You are in error when you label me as prejudiced. Indeed, you sound like the people who label me as a “Nazi” because I am against Islamic immigration and the Muslim “lifestyle” choices.
As is obvious to those with eyes and soul, some “lifestyles” ARE more pernicious than others.
To be clear, I agree that gays, lesbians, and transsexuals should have the same constitutional rights as others.
I disagree when gays, lesbians, and transsexuals attempt to force a redefinition of marriage from a union of one man and one woman into a union between two (or more) people of any sex.
I disagree when gays, lesbians, and transsexuals attempt to require society – particularly Christian religions – to give false equivalence to gay, lesbian, and transsexual sexual practices by forcing society and Christian religions to perform gay, lesbian, and transsexual “marriage” ceremonies.
I disagree when gays, lesbians, and transsexuals attempt to force schools – whether public or private – to teach children mandatory sex education that promotes gay, lesbian, and transsexual lifestyles and explains gay, lesbian, and transsexual sexual practices.
I disagree when gays, lesbians, and transsexuals attempt to force a redefinition of gender from the sexual identity that a person is born with via DNA to a sexual identity that a person perceives via personal decision.
I disagree when gays, lesbians, and transsexuals attempt to require society – particularly Christian religions – to give false equivalence to gay, lesbian, and transsexual sexual practices by forcing society and Christian religions to recognize perceived genders as actual genders.
I disagree when gays, lesbians, and transsexuals attempt to force schools – whether public or private – to allow students to use restrooms and to assign students to dormitories based on perceived genders instead of actual genders.
As is obvious, gays, lesbians, and transsexuals already possess the same constitutional rights as everyone else.
In reality, gays, lesbians, and transsexuals seek mandatory legally-enforced societal and religious (really moral) acceptance of and deference to their personal sexual decisions and lifestyles.
This comment has been removed by the author.
latté island: Your intellectual arguments are significantly weakened when you heave heavily-loaded PC MC insults at someone who disagrees with you.
Rather than offering articulate arguments based on reason, you unilaterally declare yourself to be the reasonable party – and me to be prejudiced, illogical, and discriminatory (an attempted stab at the Western PC MC heart).
As with our fellow commenter Hesperado, if you have to declare yourself “right” instead of hearing other people declare you to be so, then that may be your first clue that you need to re-think – or at least re-phrase – your premise, your arguments, and your expression of those.
The best action that everyone who comments here to take is to think a little LESS of themselves and truly LISTEN to other commenters.
Egghead: my most recent comment was disappeared by Blogger, but it doesn’t matter. Just as you’ve accused me of not listening to you, I don’t think you’ve even bothered to reply to any of my points about how gays can be just as inconvenienced from mainstreaming as straights, and how gays do not have the same interests as trannies WRT freedom of association and restrooms.
Do you really think Christian churches are being forced to do anything by gays? If some Christian churches have revised their policies, is this not voluntary on their part, and are there not still Christian churches that haven’t changed their policies, which is their right?
What’s wrong with saying I’m right and you’re wrong? Isn’t that the basis of most political discussions? But I have read and addressed your comments, while you’ve ignored mine. This is, or I hope it is, my last comment on this thread.
I can’t resist adding that I stopped liking Auster when I read his take on the Tyler Clementi incident. I want to thank my parents for not burdening me with homophobia, which lowers the IQ, not to mention common decency, of otherwise smart people.
Egghead –
“As with our fellow commenter Hesperado, if you have to declare yourself “right” instead of hearing other people declare you to be so, then that may be your first clue that you need to re-think – or at least re-phrase – your premise, your arguments, and your expression of those.”
Bingo!
Keep it up Eggy, still like your style and I’d like to second all of your last postings. Sorry that the Blogger-tip didn’t work out for you. Keep trying and you will prevail. He’s a nasty bugger 😉
Sag.
latté island: (From the News Feed thread) Egghead, gay extremists =/= people who support human rights for gay people. Ordinary gay people are fairly put off by the tranny stuff. It varies. There is no position on transexual issues among gays as a whole, although there probably is a position held by the most visible and extreme political types in the gay community.
The same applies to the gay community as it does to the feminist and Muslim communities as well.
SPEAK UP!
This silent routine is no longer acceptable. If gays want to come out of the closet, they had damn well better find a collective voice with respect to condemning their extremist counterparts.
From all that I am able to see, no such thing is happening.
Gays will find themselves and their rights thrown out with the extremist bathwater unless they begin to distinguish themselves from the hard core types who have it out for us “breeders”.
latté island: I thought about your posts today, and what I wonder is WHY you care so much about the gay, lesbian, transsexual issue?
As far as I can tell, and quite the opposite from your contention that gays, lesbians, and transsexuals need YOUR help because they are incapable (you posted a former comment to that effect).
Indeed, I find gays, lesbians, and transsexuals to be QUITE capable of furthering their own interests – especially using the bully power of unelected judges to overturn public referendums and also “make” gay-friendly law from the bench.
I particularly thought of you today because I was in a hospital with public restrooms that were bi-sex restrooms.
In other words, two single restrooms that were marked for EITHER males or females to be allowed to use – large enough to fit a couple extra kids if necessary.
Having bi-sex restrooms is a good solution to the transsexual issue. However, this solution will “cost” everyone else something.
Bi-sex restrooms would cost a lot of money to retrofit into existing buildings. Thus, businesses would have to pay more money, and people might find there to be fewer restrooms as a consequence. Cross your legs now at a sports stadium.
Meanwhile, men would get to see what it feels like to wait FOREVER in a long line to use a restroom. And, women would suffer less clean restrooms (sad but true).
I absolutely know that Christian churches are being forced to adapt to gay, lesbian, and transsexual demands.
For example, the introduction of gays and lesbians into the military WILL cause a crisis of conscience for Christian clergy who WILL be forced to accept (and thus promote) the gay and lesbian lifestyle or be court-martialed for sexual discrimination and booted from the military.
Military Chaplains Face Court Martial
Egghead wrote: latté island: I thought about your posts today, and what I wonder is WHY you care so much about the gay, lesbian, transsexual issue?
Why do YOU care so much? I’ll disclose that I wasn’t completely straight as a teenager, and since I’m not sorry, I’m headed for hell. LOL. Of course I’m concerned that the religious right wants to control and punish things that are completely normal.
As for why gays need my help with politics: yes they do. Because my life as an adult has been one of heterosexual privilege, I’m not as damaged and alienated as most people who have lived a gay lifestyle. So, maybe I have more mental freedom to see both sides of the issue, and I want to help both sides find some common ground instead of all this blaming and reaction, which can only help the Jihad.
Here’s WHY I care: Throughout history, societal acceptance of a gay lifestyle appears to lead to pederasty whether in ancient Greece – or modern Islamic countries.
The most gay places in the world today are Islamic and provide a CLEAR picture of the disadvantages that an unchallenged gay lifestyle offers to women and their children.
Man boy sex (Pederasty) in Islam
Two more articles with reasons for concern:
Jun 2010 – Western ‘Gay Rights’, Islamic Pederasty
<http://www.examiner.com/law-enforcement-in-national/afghan-pedophiles-and-pederasts-unfettered-by-u-s-nato>Dec 2010 – Afghan pedophiles and pederasts unfettered by U.S., NATO
You don’t have to go to the Ummah to find pederasty. There seems to be some of that going around in some Western churches, and they cover it up instead of sincerely trying to protect children. This is not a gay issue, it’s a sexual repression issue. I think frank discussion and acceptance of the varieties of adult consensual sexuality can protect children from immature, sexually repressed male authority figures.
oops! 🙂
Jun 2010 – Western ‘Gay Rights’, Islamic Pederasty
Dec 2010 – Afghan pedophiles and pederasts unfettered by U.S., NATO
Wikipedia: “Anthropologists propose three subdivisions of homosexuality as age-structured, egalitarian and gender-structured.[2][3] Pederasty is the archetypal example of male age-structured homosexuality.[2]
Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer distinguishes pederasty from pedophilia, which he defined as a separate fourth type that he described as “grossly pathological in all societies of which we have record.” According to Gorer, the main characteristic of homosexual pederasty is the age difference (either of generation or age-group) between the partners. In his study of native cultures, pederasty appears typically as a passing stage in which the adolescent is the beloved of an older male, who may act as a mentor. He remains as such until he reaches a certain developmental threshold, after which he in turn takes on an adolescent beloved of his own.[4]”
Latté –
You wrote:
“There seems to be some of that going around in some Western churches, and they cover it up instead of sincerely trying to protect children. This is not a gay issue, it’s a sexual repression issue.”
False. This is an issue of sexual “liberation” promoted by post-war progressives and for some time (the time of incidental abuse, in far lower rates than outside the Church) adopted by mostly laymen and some priests in pre and post Vatican-II times.
I am now reminded of your facile Pope-bashing topic of some time ago on your own blog. I suspect you are not in a position to discuss matters in a frank and open manner.
This is what you had to say about B-16’s comments on false “tolerance” and “pluralism”:
“This gobbledegook is almost indistinguishable from Islamic ranting, minus the calls to beat women.”
I regret to say that what you seem to be, is just another condescending (“intelligence”?) and typically bigoted progressive propagandist. Pity.
Sag.
Note how Wikipedia refers to pederasty in glowing terms as a “legitimate” form of homosexuality.
All this talk of “beloved” belies the truth which is that boys, most of whom are heterosexual, are FORCED by unrelated older men to engage in homosexual activity as a societal norm.
Western civilization (except the Wikipedia writers) realized that pederasty is just a fancy name for long-term pedophilia and made it a crime.
Islamic civilization accepts and promotes pedophilia for both boys and girls as a part of the Muslim male prerogative.
I firmly believe that pederasty IS a gay issue – rather than a sexual repression issue.
Ancient Greece had NO sexual repression (no Catholic guilt and no Puritan mores); but, when gay men obtained power, gay men instituted pederastic pedophilia as a societal norm.
The same pattern occurred in Islam where gay men have achieved 1,400+ years of power to molest multiple little boys with permission and impunity from Allah via Mohammed.
Hi Sagunto: Thanks for your various comments. I always enjoy reading them! 🙂
Hi Zenster: I gather that Ann B. tickled your fancy. Feminist enough, for you? 🙂