Wow, this is great: the Democratic National Committee has put out a list of officially approved talking points for denouncing thoughtcrime at Thanksgiving dinner. The site is called “Your Republican Uncle“.
Leaving aside what fun this will make Thanksgiving for everyone, and the DNC’s presumption that Democrats young enough to have living uncles can’t defend the party line with their own store of knowledge (in other words, they are expected to defend the party and its propaganda without knowing, in fact, why they ought to), it’s interesting to me that it isn’t parents this thing singles out, but uncles (and not aunts!). (Perhaps they’re counting on heritability of political dispositions, although one would think uncles would share a lot of the relevant sections of the parental genome…)
I notice also that they are counting on some awfully dumb uncles here. (Note to my nephews: try any of this on me and see how you do.) For example, the model Climate Change discussion goes like this:
Uncle Running-Dog Lickspittle Jackal: “Climate change is just a liberal scare tactic.”
Young Hero Comrade Making Glorious Struggle for Elimination of Injustice and Creation of Heavenly Kingdom on Earth: “Why are conservatives more likely to believe that climate change is a conspiracy than to acknowledge what 97% of climate scientists ”” and the majority of Americans ”” believe? Climate change is real, and it’s man made. The Republican presidential field is living in denial.”
That’s all for this topic, apparently; surely that’s enough to settle all debate. Oh, wait! Just below this devastating riposte is a link that says:
“See more (your Republican uncle is still talking)”.
The treasonous old bastard is even more of a sucker for punishment than we had imagined. So, we click the link, and the beating continues:
U.R-D.L.J: “The United States can’t stay economically competitive if we address climate change.”
Y.H.C.M.G.S.f.E.o.I.a.C.o.H.K.o.E: “Climate change itself is already taking a toll on our economy. In 2012 alone, climate and weather disasters cost the United States more than $100 billion, but despite that fact, not one GOP presidential candidate has a serious plan to stop it. Right now, other countries are making huge investments in research and development to confront this crisis with new technologies ”” which means new industries and new jobs. We can’t afford to fall behind them.”
And that’s that. Call the coroner, and pass the yams.
I should mention also that the passages I’ve bolded above were underlined in the original. I thought this meant they were links to informative sources, but no — they link directly to Twitter! Clicking them will send the Party message directly to your followers. (Your superiors are watching too, so get Tweeting, comrades.)
Go and have a look. In all seriousness, people: this is what we are up against. This is the modern American Left. Think for a minute about the kind of mind that would produce something like this. Think — and this should give you all a frisson of horror — about the kind of “mind” that would consume this without gagging, and deploy it as instructed.
Then go and buy emergency food supplies, bottled water, and ammo.
57 Comments
Wait a minute. Didn’t the OEM tell us there is no party line? Is it possible that such a sincere guy was fibbing? Nah. He’s just a pathological lying scumbag.
http://www.duffelblog.com/2015/11/white-house-cancels-turkey-pardon-russian-fighter/
Malcolm, I don’t know, Politico has a stupid satirical piece:
“How to BE the Crazy Uncle This Thanksgiving:
Politico’s guide to a truly explosive holiday dinner”
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/how-to-be-the-crazy-uncle-this-thanksgiving-213397
Maybe politicos find this sort of thing amusing, because this piece was written by Matt Latimer, a former GWB speechwriter
Actually, LB, that’s not bad, satire-wise. I like the fruit fly in the Prius.
Malcolm, Families are often a comedy of errors, like how did my conservative parents end up with my youngest brother, a Green politico. When I was pregnant with my third child, way back in 1984, my youngest brother, a zero population growth zealot, angrily berated me and after regaling me with “statistics” on world overpopulation, asked, “Do you think your genes and Tom’s are so great that you need to keep spreading them around?” I just smiled at him and said, “Well, yes, I do!” He didn’t have anything left to say. And my third child turned out to be a bona fide genius – now, how’s that for karma, lol.
Happy Thanksgiving Everybody!
What Whitewall said!
Ditto.
BTW, I have read that the Pope has given his seal of approval to the veracity of climate change. Since he is not (to my knowledge) a climatologist, I assume he has received some pertinent information from The Man Upstairs.
If that is the case, I see no sense in debating this thorny issue any further. Moreover, if the Pope is amenable, perhaps he could ask The Man Upstairs whether or not String Theory can lead us to a Theory of Everything. That would be really cool.
Oh … Henry
You recall The Man Upstairs didn’t shoot Moses an email, rather He used what was available being what He (as opposed to Al Gore’s creation – note the small “c”) Created.
Now when it comes to Pope messaging the answer ought be obvious – but there’s alot more people in the world than there was at Exodus times so it’s riskier to just drop stones (might boink an unintended recipient atop the head … Mailer Daemon and all that bear in mind).
But still He needed some way to message without the modern risk of forest fires which, in this day and age would surely risk at least a fine and possibly jail time. So He had the foresight to put in The Book, Hosea 11:4 “cord” (translated variously from the Greek “khorde” which can also be taken to mean ‘string.’)
Tying all the above up, little me can only assume He dropped a string down from the Heavens to Vatican City and the Pope thereby issued his Bull.
Which by the Way Henry probably means “Ye shall know it by the string” except it’s up to us to figure the details out.
Unfortunately for us, JK, as you no doubt know, the devil is in the details.
Drats! Henry.
You onto me or’d you just get lucky?
(If the latter – “waste” a couple bucks on Powerball.)
That kind of straight line could only be a gimme, JK.
Lord have mercy folks, Arlo Guthrie is on PBS playing the 50th Anniversary of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”! I heard the very first line of the intro tune–“I don’t want a pickle, just want to ride my motor-sickle”. I’m still watching. Ahh, nostalgia.
Man taking pic of our sitting President:
[img]https://drscdn.500px.org/photo/130402789/m%3D900/3f720b99f67355eb352ad776a54e045a[/img]
Exactly as I predicted: the media dropped coverage of the shooting of Black Lives Matter protestors, even before the latest incident of right wing extremist violence in Colorado Springs.
The right wing has been demonizing and vilifying Planned Parenthood, while spreading vicious and false accusations, following the undercover videos shot by a fraudster pretending to act in good faith as a medical researcher. Carly Fiorina flat out lied about Planned Parenthood during a debate, and was not challenged by the timid moderators. (When she was subsequently challenged, she simply doubled down on her falsehood, just as Donald Trump is doubling down about a 9/11 celebration which never happened, and Dr. Ben Carson is doubling down about a Yale class which never existed and a West Point scholarship which was never offered. Maybe they are just imitating Reagan, who told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal that he personally witnessed the liberation of Nazi death camps, when in reality he was shooting a movie at the MGM lot in Culver City at the time.) The deaths in Colorado Springs were as inevitable as the assassination of Dr. George Tiller after he was incessantly called a “baby-killer” on Fox News, as well as the other abortion doctors and workers who have been assassinated by the “pro-life” movement.
These latest incidents push the death toll in America from right wing extremists since 9/11 to over double that of Islamic jihadists:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/opinion/the-other-terror-threat.html?_r=0
It would be appreciated if the moderate elements in the conservative-American community, assuming they exist, would express their outrage at not only the perpetrators of right wing violence, but also at their enablers, like the video fraudsters, Fiorina, and O’Reilly. Given the hysteria and fear-mongering over Syrian refugees, it is also inevitable that there will be right wing inspired violence against Muslims (although the man who killed six Sikh worshippers in Wisconsin, thinking they were Muslims, shows that right wing terrorists get confused easily about religion). That’s not going to happen. As we know from when conservatives held the levers of power during the Bush administration, contrition and conservatism have nothing to do with each other. Conservatives will retreat into their safe zones on Fox News, talk radio, and the blogosphere, and find a way to evade responsibility and blame Obama, the left, and the media instead.
** Whoops! Meant to post on the Crickets thread. **
OEM…even race has to take a back seat to abortion among the holy sacraments of the Left. So Planned Parenthood 24/7 it will be until the life is wrung out of the story.
The killing inside a PPH does not justify the killing this deranged man did once inside. His is a premeditated crime. We know very little about this man outside of what he did to innocent people.
It seems you have an event that feeds a desperate need to mount your high horse of indignation or something. Careful you don’t mount up so fast you fall off the other side. Much more is to be learned. And maybe not all of it will go as some like you hope. We will see in time.
As far as demanding all these right wingers and Republicans obey a demand to step up and assume a position to dutifully genuflect over events of yesterday…forget it. You have no standing to demand anything… Logic: Islam has literally nothing to do with the Global Jihad, but 1 murderer in Colorado, a mystery man, is the “real” face of the GOP?
Right, so if i understand correctly there are a few points here:
1) When a right-winger commits a shooting with multiple casualties, it’s OK to blame the right wing in general for their innumerable sins, in contrast to blaming Muslims generally, or blacks generally, for their violent acts. (That is to say, when a white loony shoots some people, it’s a conservative-ideology problem, but when blacks commit murder at seven times the rate of whites, for example, it’s only a gun-control problem. And despite all the violence and horror and suffering and instability caused worldwide in the name of Islam — imagine, just for a lovely moment, what a world without Islam would be like! — it’s never anything to do with Islam itself.)
2) That we have a yuuuuge problem with right-wing terrorism in America, but, our own home-grown population of dangerous people obviously being insufficient to occupy us, we should therefore also bring in large numbers of yet another inscrutable population known to contain significant percentages of violent extremists and their sympathizers.
3) Oh, and of course Planned Parenthood never does anything that anyone should object to in any way.
And do we even know yet why this guy shot the place up? While I agree it’s likely he’s a low-impulse-control rightie type who thinks PP are a bunch of cold-blooded murderers (after all, as such a person might observe, since 1973 we have extinguished almost as many defenseless potential American lives as the current population of Great Britain), for all we know so far he might just be a “disgruntled former employee”, or even a Bernie Sanders Democrat with a brain tumor.
Anyway, if you you think things are unstable now in the West, just you wait, amigo. Your side hates and sneers at the Right (keep it up! – see how that goes), and the Right, I can tell you, isn’t too thrilled with you guys, either (and do keep in mind that their numbers are legion, and they have most of the guns). Meanwhile, race relations are in the toilet, our public institutions are becoming little more than propaganda factories and grievance-mills, and the nation is fracturing into a rubble-heap of mutually antagonistic political and demographic factions — a process that your side, for its own diabolical reasons, seeks to accelerate.
So yeah, enjoy all of this while it lasts; before long it’s going to be the “good old days”.
I am not an MD (though I am a doctor and I have also stayed at a Holiday Inn Express on occasion) but it seems to me that the angry and confused OEM needs to get a series of shots for rabies. But before he rushes out to his nearest urgent care clinic, it would be prudent for him to wipe the spittle and foam off his chin.
@ Malcom
when blacks commit murder at seven times the rate of whites
mmm, the FBI crime stats lump a lot of what is not culturally what we think of as white in with the white category on crime stats. There’s no way of knowing what the actual figures are but it’s a fair bit higher than 7 to 1. Benjamin Franklin noted that the black murder rate in Philadelphia was around 10 times the white murder rate, which is probably close to what it is today.
You’d almost think it was some sort of natural phenomenon.
@ OEM
It would be appreciated if the moderate elements in the conservative-American community, assuming they exist, would express their outrage at not only the perpetrators of right wing violence,
This is pretty much universal on the right. Either you have your head way up your ass or you’re just lying.
also at their enablers,
Not sure what you mean by enablers. Basically, what you are saying is that any opposition to leftism is tantamount to inciting terrorism. This is what’s known as a bad faith assertion, aka intellectual dishonesty.
there will be right wing inspired violence against Muslims
No, there will be tribal violence against Muslims. This is a foregone conclusion. Diversty + Proximity = War. Everywhere. Always. The people who will be responsible for the inevitable coming violence are the diversity-mongers who seek to eliminate the nation-state and usher in one-world government, such as yourself.
Yes, I’m sure you’ll deny you’re a one-world government advocate and when you do you’re just lying. Hell, you may even lie to yourself that you aren’t seeking one-world government but it is lying nonetheless.
I don’t comment here much, OEM, but pretty much every comment I’ve seen from you just reeks of intellectual dishonesty.
To elaborate on my one-world government assertion:
A) cohesive sovereign nation-states require strong boundaries
B) large-scale migration creates fuzzy nation boundaries leading to loss of sovereignty
C) this creates a power vacuum
D) the only possible answer to which is one-world government
Really, this isn’t even very secret anymore as there is a great deal of evidence, now, of european pols from the previous two generations who clearly were seeking to establish a one-world government.
The bottom-line is that if you don’t advocate clear and strong national distinctions then you are an advocate of one-world government by default.
“Benjamin Franklin noted that the black murder rate in Philadelphia was around 10 times the white murder rate, which is probably close to what it is today.”
Never heard that one, Asher, and I’m a fan of Ben Franklin. Got a cite?
Asher, regarding the seven-to-one number, you’re correct. I used that figure because it was what I had calculated from the DOJ’s published statistics, but as you say those numbers don’t discriminate (!) between, for example, whites and Hispanics. So yes, the number is almost certainly higher. (In a recent year, for example, blacks and Hispanics together accounted for over 95% of NYC gun assaults.)
You are right also to cite Heartiste’s Law about tribal violence. We learn nothing from history, it seems.
The OEM is a pathological liar.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
[img]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/George_Santayana.jpg/330px-George_Santayana.jpg[/img]
No, he’s not a pathological liar, Henry. Deep in the grip of a memetic pathology, perhaps, but not a pathological liar.
Agreed, not a pathological liar. It is very irritating how many people apply labels such as pathological or sociopath indiscriminately. A pathological liar will lie about things for which misdirection has no discernible purpose.
I used to think that the best explanation for the term “liar” was “saying someone knows to be false”. However, this definition places far too much emphasis on conscious, intentional thought, removing the responsibility to investigate things. A much better explanation is “believing something when an obviously better explanation is available”.
The latter definition places an implied requirement on people to actively seek truth, where the former invites them to avoid seeking truth.
Ideologies can exert brutally iron grip on the mind. I suggest to people who honestly want to understand the world to avoid any normative terms for an extended period of time, say, one to five years. Once one begins to focus on how the world “should” work one begins to lose the ability to understand how it actually does work.
Ideology has traditionally been construed as a system of ideas pertaining to how things work. Under this definition of the term physics is an ideology. A much better explanation of ideology is that it is a system of ideas pertaining to how the world *should* work.
The first thing I note is that most mass shootings don’t result in more than one person dying, which is a point the media ignore.
As for the situation in general: since the year is almost over, let’s assume the remaining month won’t change the statistics much. And we don’t know the total number of homicides yet, but it probably won’t be far from previous years. Let’s be conservative, so to speak, and call it 12,000. 431 would be, what, 3.5% of total homicides? So basically, you’re focusing on a minuscule part of a situation that’s particularly controversial and conducive to the evocation of outrage in order to stir up emotions. (Just as the Left also does with black civilians being killed by cops rather than by other black civilians.) So, apart from the basic dishonesty of doing that while calling yourself rational, where precisely do you get off criticizing your opponents for doing that about Planned Parenthood?
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
The problem with this comment is that it ignores how the left views the world. For the left, the past is a product of nothing more than bad ideas. For them, once one replaces the bad ideas with good ideas the past simply doesn’t matter, therefore remembering it is pointless.
The concept of enlightenment was that as bad ideas were discarded our species would move into adulthood, ala Kant. It never occurred to the Enlightenment that the ideas they considered bad were a product not of the mind but of objective reality.
The problem I have with that explanation, Asher, is that the Left doesn’t replace what they consider “bad” ideas of the past. Rather, they adhere to the ideas that have been repudiated over and over again with the expectation that “this time it will work”. Einstein thought such thinking to be a reasonable definition of insanity.
1) When the Republican candidates for President, combined with right wing media, spread inflammatory and incendiary lies about Planned Parenthood, they are most certainly culpable for inciting violence. When Bill O’Reilly calls Dr. Tiller a baby killer, or when Carly Fiorina falsely accuses Planned Parenthood of butchering a live baby, they have blood on their hands for the murders which occurred. Is it “OK to blame the right wing in general?” Given the fact that, AFAIK, not a single right wing voice stood in opposition to their hysteria, it is absolutely reasonable and appropriate to blame the right wing in general.
The high rate of black-on-black homicide is not because ideologues pushing agenda egged them on. This has no relevance to either jihadist or anti-abortion violence.
Muslims who support extremist violence are most certainly responsible for jihadist violence. We have seen in recent days how the Islamic world has deplored the Paris bombings, from the Pyramids being lit in French colors to the fatwas issued by clerics to the videos being distributed by the Indonesian government. The distinction is simple: it is unfair to blame Muslims in general for something most of them condemn, while it is perfectly fair to blame conservatives in general for the inflammatory and calumnious assertions which few, if any, conservatives have objected to.
2) Neither the refugee population nor Muslims emigrating to America “contain significant percentages of violent extremists and their sympathizers.” We have admitted 750,000 refugees since 9/11, with a failure rate of exactly two (the Tsarnaev parents). Muslims emigrating here through the normal immigration process have had a similarly negligible rate of miscreants, and the millions of Muslims who now live here are a model minority with a higher average income than the median. There is no common sense reason why a terrorist would wait two years in a resettlement camp, with no assurance that he would end up in America, when he could come much more easily on a visa. Conflating Syrian refugees with the Paris bombers — who were neither Syrian nor refugees — is shameless fear mongering, just as the elision of the millions of Muslims who have successfully emigrated here and radical jihadists abroad is bigoted nonsense. It is in the American DNA to be a beacon of hope to those fleeing death, torture, and oppression. It is regrettable that many of those who talk about American exceptionalism, and who will sing songs of joy and brotherhood at Christmas, will turn their backs on those who are, quite literally, fleeing for their lives.
Extremists on both sides push the clash-of-civilizations narrative. Those who claim that Muslims are all out to get us can’t explain why the ones who are here are loyal and productive Americans, or why an infidel can walk through the streets of Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, or any number of other Muslim countries without fear of harm. Characterizing a handful of extremists as a synecdoche for a religion of over a billion people, combined with a tendentious description of Islam and a few Arabic words for a veneer of authenticity, is as intellectually bankrupt as using the KKK and the Westboro Baptist Church as a synecdoche for Christianity.
France, to its great credit, and Hollande, to his great credit, are continuing their announced plan to take far more Syrian refugees than the 1600 or so we took in this year or the 10,000 we will take in next year. It is embarrassing to me as an American to see the French demonstrating more guts and compassion than we do.
3) No, Planned Parenthood does not do anything which anyone should object to in any way. They provide medical services to the poor; about half of their facilities perform abortions; and they facilitate medical research using fetal tissue at their cost. All of this is legal and moral, and none of it is objectionable in the slightest.
The fact that many object to the termination of unwanted pregnancies has nothing to do with yesterday’s murders. Abortion is a constitutionally protected right, and certainly nobody who objects to abortions is forced to have one. Your implicit suggestion that because, in your view, Planned Parenthood has acted in such a way that they somehow deserved what happened, is beneath contempt and not worth responding to. I feel the same way about the NRA that you feel about Planned Parenthood. This does not, in any way, justify me or someone else shooting people at an NRA office.
The current opposition to abortion, incidentally, suffers from the same sort of universalism as leftism, btw. Regardless of what one thinks of the current Roe Equilibrium most of the opposition to is of a blatantly universalist nature.
@ Henry
The problem I have with that explanation, Asher, is that the Left doesn’t replace what they consider “bad” ideas of the past. Rather, they adhere to the ideas that have been repudiated over and over again with the expectation that “this time it will work”.
Leftism is about power, purely and simply. The Hegelian notion of a slow and inevitable advancement from bad ideas to good ideas in history is simply window dressing for power. Again, the left first lies to itself. I’m quite certain leftist generally consider their positions truthfully held. Once one beliefs in the narrative of progress it becomes an article of faith that the world is progressing from worse to better ideas.
I am not the first to point out that these are articles of faith and, therefore, beyond rational considerations. The lie is that they are rational considerations.
Einstein thought such thinking to be a reasonable definition of insanity.
I strongly advise against attributing three explanations to one’s opponents, or anyone for that matter: insane, evil or stupid. Once you go down those roads you put whatever behaviors or ideas you are confronting beyond rational consideration. This is always a dead end.
I concede the point, Malcolm, since I am not accredited to identify what is or isn’t pathological (you, at least, are the son of an eminent physician).
How about “habitual” liar?
I think that’s a good point, Asher, except for the “always”. I believe you should never say “always” or “never”.
Incidentally, I wasn’t attributing insanity to anyone. I was quoting Big Al who knew a thing or two about what was sensible or not.
@ OEM
When Bill O’Reilly calls Dr. Tiller a baby killer, or when Carly Fiorina falsely accuses Planned Parenthood of butchering a live baby, they have blood on their hands for the murders which occurred.
This is such bullshit as to warrant calling you a liar. If one holds the position that a fetus is a human being at a certain stage then those are simply descriptions. That O’Reilly and Fiorina hold a different evaluation of what life is human than yourself is what is at issue here. Again, what you are saying is that opposition to leftist evaluations of this is impermissible.
This stems from the leftist article of faith that history is progressing from worse to better ideas which will solve all of our problems. You are presenting metaphysical positions as rational arguments and those two have no intersection – what philosophers call a category error.
not a single right wing voice stood in opposition to their hysteria
That someone possesses a different evaluation of something than yourself doesn’t make it hysteria. Again, what you are doing is asserting that your evaluations of things are the only permissible ones. You simply don’t get to do that.
Neither the refugee population nor Muslims emigrating to America “contain significant percentages of violent extremists and their sympathizers.”
This is actually correct. The real reason to exclude such populations is that they are a detriment to social cohesion. The logic of what follows in your comment is that the progress of ideas is leading to a one world government with one universal sovereignty.
Those who claim that Muslims are all out to get us
This is a product of leftist strangleholds on academia and media. The real reason is that large muslim populations are detrimental to social order. Again, this is a general demographic observation and not applicable to any particular individual muslim.
No, Planned Parenthood does not do anything which anyone should object to in any way. They provide medical services to the poor; about half of their facilities perform abortions
Again, all you are doing is proclaiming that any difference in evaluations from yours are tout court impermissible. If someone considers a fetus a human being prior to the age where abortions are currently performed then it follows that, under such an evaluation, those abortions are murder.
For myself, my sole political goal is the breakup of the United States into smaller and more socially cohesive sovereign units. As such, I waste little time arguing over the Roe Equilibrium.
Henry
I think that’s a good point, Asher, except for the “always”. I believe you should never say “always” or “never”.
If A logically follows from B then it is entirely appropriate to use “always”. Conversely, if A logically excludes B then “never” is also appropriate. When one attributes “insanity” to one’s opponent then one logically puts that opponents behavior or ideas beyond rational consideration because someone behaving irrationally is, by definition, beyond reason.
Also, much of what Einstein thought outside physics is just risible.
I don’t disagree with you on that (complete) point, Asher. That is not to say, however, that “rational consideration” is necessarily the only appropriate means of confrontation.
When confronting irrational and, yes, even evil opponents, rational consideration is a complete waste of time. If you have been following the ideological confrontation between Malcolm and his rabid Leftist friend for years (as I have) you might also conclude that the (tens of?) thousands of words they have exchanged have had zero effect on either one of them.
Perhaps that doesn’t mean I should resort to labeling the OEM as a Leftist jerk-off. But there it is. He insults my remembrance of my grandparents (all four of whom perished from the atrocities committed against them by the Nazis) as he continues to make excuses for the neo-Nazi terrorists.
If A is joking and B takes it seriously, does that mean B can pontificate about the rules of logic?
I addressed these remarks in my preceding comment.
I am not sure how that remark relates to my claim that I was quoting Einstein rather than attributing insanity to someone. Moreover, I think it is unworthy of you to make a gratuitous slur against one of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced.
@ Henry
If someone is an opponent it already means you are confronting them, therefore, adding the modifiers insane or evil is superfluous. Do you oppose them because they are evil? Or are you using that term as an explanation? Again, “opponent” suffices so such terms need not be added.
the (tens of?) thousands of words they have exchanged have had zero effect on either one of them.
The sole reason to converse with a leftist is to demonstrate the intellectual poverty of their positions to the undecided. There is no other purpose. True, it helps to spar with them as practice even if no one else observes but thinking you can convince them is a fool’s errand because you are dealing with basic personal identity and articles of faith. Were OEM to give up his faith he would be giving up all identity, making himself a non-person. People would rather identify with the absolute worst our world has to offer than to be without identity.
If A is joking and B takes it seriously, does that mean B can pontificate about the rules of logic?
I’m guessing there’s some sort of wordplay I’m missing because my comment was about deriving a conclusion from a premise.
I think it is unworthy of you to make a gratuitous slur against one of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced.
I have browsed some of Einstein’s political/social writing and much of it was downright idiotic. He was a sexual incontinent and I suspect this had something to do with those writings (no, that is not an ad hom because I am not assessing his writing on the basis of his personal predilections).
Also, frankly, comparing the jihadists to Nazis is a bit uncharitable to the Nazis.
@ OEM
The only reason why abortion is an issue at all is social diversity. If you broke up the US and let the various peoples go their separate ways abortion would cease to be a political issue.
Diversity + Proximity = War.
Always
@ Henry
I know people who spend a lifetime praying for the spiritual salvation of a loved one with no measurable results. Would you call that insanity?
I have a better definition of insanity:
Doing something at odds with one’s actual goals.
@Asher
I neither oppose them because they are evil nor do I use that term as an explanation. I despise them because they are evil.
I understand that. Both you and Malcolm are good at it. But it’s not for me. I would much rather sit in traffic, naked, eating glass. [Note — the foregoing last sentence is a joke.]
I’ll draw you a picture: If Henry is joking and Asher takes it seriously, does that mean Asher can pontificate about the rules of logic?
I am confident that Einstein would have had a similar opinion of your writing though I am also confident that he would never say so in public.
I appreciate your sentiment, but I am loath to offer any form of charity to the Nazis or the jihadists.
I do not spend any time praying for the spiritual salvation of my grandparents if that is what you are implying. I mourn the loss of the experience of knowing a grandparent, which I never had. As to what I would call “praying etc.”, I wouldn’t call it insanity; I would call it an act of faith though I myself do not indulge in such acts.
I’ll stand by this. Muslims, in poll after poll around the world, show that significant percentages of them are sympathetic to violence against Western populations as a legitimate tool of Islamic expansion and redress, to the imposition of Shari’a in Western nations, and so on. There’s no reason why anyone who has studied either the religion or its history should be surprised by this. As for “Syrian” “refugees”, I’ve been over all of this already, so I’m not going to repeat myself here.
Is terrorism the only, or even the main, reason to oppose mass Muslim settlement in the West? Of course not, as I have said over and over again for years. Asher is correct to say that the real problem is a much simpler one of corrosion of social cohesion. I grow weary of making this irrefutable point, so I will just quote myself from a week ago:
As for arguing with leftists, I have characterized the unproductiveness of the endless arguments we’ve had here as being to due to incommensurable axioms; Asher’s characterization of them as foundering on “articles of faith” is effectively the same point. That this really is an unbridgeable gulf is made apparent by The One-Eyed Man’s incomprehension regarding the revulsion with which so many Americans reacted to the Planned Parenthood videos. Even for those pro-life sorts who accept, however reluctantly, that abortion is the law of the land — despite its being for them a supreme moral horror, in that they believe it to be the mass slaughter of the innocent — what was new in this latest round was the truly grotesque indifference to the tiny corpses PP creates en masse, and serves up on demand. That you simply cannot even fathom how any of this could reasonably bother anybody, Peter, is horrifying. It is one thing to say “We will continue to do this sorrowful thing because it is not prohibited by law, so you must not interfere”, and to condemn vigilantes who refuse to stand for it. It is quite another to look at the mass termination of unborn lives, and to see actual video of blase discussions, over salad, about how you crush the life out of a well-developed fetus in just such a way as to get the best bits for your customers, and say “that’s nothing”. It makes me think that you are, in some important way, already dead inside.
You do not distinguish yourself, Peter, by putting this forward as a serious argument. Let’s say that, in addition to “abortion” — the killing of a person under construction in one’s own body — we also had a newly discovered right to “divortion” — the right to murder, at will, a spouse one no longer has an interest in supporting. Suppose also that in the past half-century 55 million spouses had been killed, and that there were people out there who thought this was mass murder. Would you point out to them that “nobody who objects to divortions is forced to have one”, and thus there is no moral basis upon which anyone may object?
Malcolm,
It is important to distinguish between the articles of faith, themselves, and the contents of those articles. The positions held by Peter, taken to their logical conclusions, can lead to nothing besides one-world government.
So, Peter is entitled to advocate one-world government and that article of faith lies beyond rational analysis. What he does not get to do is pretend that he advocates anything besides one-world government.
He can hold whatever positions he likes but he does not get to lie about them.
It’s interesting that leftists seem to have a sort of taqiyya whereby they can lie about their true articles of faith. That is something they clearly share with Muslims.
Asher,
I don’t suppose Peter would agree with you that the positions he holds lead inevitably to one-world government, nor would he agree that he hopes or advocates for that, or that he’s practicing taqiyya and lying about what he really wants. (Honestly, you underestimate his blithe naivete, and ascribe to him a cunning purposefulness that just isn’t there.)
He simply enjoys a comfortable, affluent life of coastal California hedonia, in a pleasant historical and cultural bubble that makes it possible to adopt a naive universalism at, so far, no unbearable cost. What “logical conclusion” you arrive at from that starting point depends very sensitively on one’s assumptions.
What’s more, the positions held by Peter can, it seems to me, lead to other possibilities besides one-world government. They might also, for example, simply lead to general collapse, and to a broken-up world of smaller polities, each fending as best they can. Or they might provoke a powerful reaction leading to a better-organized disaggregation of incompatible peoples. They might also lead simply to a slow, asymptotic decline without much disintegration, but also without supranational consolidation. And so on.
Malcolm,
What Peter agrees to is not relevant since he is not our intended target audience. Further, the beauty of leftist taqiyya is that the holder first fools himself into accepting the dissimulation. I’m quite sure that Peter has no idea of the root core of anything he says and that his very notion of identity is tied up in not rigorously examining it.
Now, when you say that the conclusions of Peter’s idea might lead somewhere other than world government you are talking about their outcomes upon meeting reality. I am solely talking about the internal logic of the ideas, themselves. Any deviation by Peter from that logic is simply an unprincipled exception and the goal is to demonstrate that to undecideds.
That you simply cannot even fathom how any of this could reasonably bother anybody, Peter, is horrifying.
That you are still horrified indicates you are not horrified enough. You are still clinging to the universalist notion of “shared humanity”, that is the illusion. When you say that something is already dead inside him what you are really hinting at is that something about him is dead to you but you aren’t sure you want to admit it.
Asher, if you think that at this point in my extended ruminations I am still any sort of a believer in human universalism, I can assure you that you are mistaken. This is not to say that there aren’t universal aspects of the human experience, for example the capacity for suffering, that deserve our consideration.
When it comes to Peter, what horrifies me is not that anyone might be ensnared by the ideology and worldview he holds — which would be a “universalist” reaction — but that it’s happened to a highly intelligent person that I’ve been good friends with for 45 years. (You probably didn’t know that last part, so your assumption was not an unreasonable one.)
I think that qualifies you for sainthood, Malcolm.
Henry…you are something else! Is there a “halos are us” outlet near you for buying the “saint’s halo”?
Malcolm
Lately I’ve become quite skeptical of the universality of suffering. Yes, in the abstract everyone suffers, but the range of causes and experiences of suffering seem so vast that the concept of “human suffering” as a unitary category is meaningless.
I was quite aware of your and Peter’s history.
Careful there, Asher, that you don’t draw the circle too closely around yourself. I understand and agree with your wariness about universalism, but the opposite pole, moral solipsism, is hardly the Promised Land.
The temperate zones — of wise self-interest based on clear-eyed understanding of human differences — lie somewhere in between.
Having been aware most of my life that the society in which I live offers me no moral consideration do I have any other option besides moral solipsism?