Precious, sacred, holy bipartisan garbage.

“We’ve done this in a bipartisan fashion, and frankly, it’s a good bill,” House Speaker John Boehner would say after negotiating another quantum leap in the national debt into an obscure funnel of government bureaucracy that will fund Obamacare and allow for amnesty for illegal aliens. That’s all we conservatives get for our vote, just a month after voters elected Republicans to take an exactly opposite course of action than the one they’ve immediately taken.

If the Republicans had been in charge of running D Day, it's a certainty that they'd have sought a bipartisan solution to the perceived need for the Normandy landings. The logic of that thought is bulletproof, it seems to me, as the recent CRomnibus bill shows the same thinking, namely, that there is no such thing on the planet as an enemy, a hostile combination, or a corrupt, subversive, alien political faction with a destructive agenda.

Neither is there a Republican "principle" that can't be watered down, compromised, or abandoned so the boodle can flow into the right hands and the GOP establishment clown car can make the victory laps in the media circus.

Nice doggy! Good boyyyy!

Notes
^[1] "The Republicans' Road to Rovetown." By William Sullivan, AmericanThinker, 12/19/14.

A Cautionary Tale

Ever more often these days, I have a completely different set of ideas about what to write about ten minutes before I set my fingers to the keys than when I actually start to type. Today is one such day.

It started with this column by John Kass:

Jayne and Jon Cornwill, an Australian couple, recently came to America with a bit of trouble.

The trouble? Boys.

They have three little boys, and three rambunctious boys were quite enough for the Cornwills, thank you. What the Cornwills wanted was a little girl.

But all they got were boys. And this led to what is known in the sex selection business as profound "gender disappointment."...

So they turned to modern science, which many believe can solve the problems of the modern age. And they found an answer to gender disappointment:

Pre-implantation genetic screening, or genetic gender selection.

Please read the whole thing. Then read Chapter 3 of C. S. Lewis’s “The Abolition Of Man,” and reflect.

---

The great Thomas Szasz once defined freedom as “That which you demand for yourself but would deny to others.” There’s a great deal of truth in that. Most of us trust others less than they deserve, but ourselves far too much. We even trust ourselves to control others’ futures: mostly by decreeing what they must, may, or must not do, but in these latter years also by decreeing what they must or must not be.

George Orwell was focused on the cognitive and emotional aspects thereof:

‘You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was “Thou shalt not”. The command of the totalitarians was “Thou shalt”. Our command is “THOU ART”.

Lewis had a wider focus:

`Man's conquest of Nature' is an expression often used to describe the progress of applied science....I do not wish to disparage all that is really beneficial in the process described as `Man's conquest', much less all the real devotion and self-sacrifice that has gone to make it possible. But having done so I must proceed to analyse this conception a little more closely. In what sense is Man the possessor of increasing power over Nature?

Let us consider three typical examples: the aeroplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive. In a civilized community, in peace-time, anyone who can pay for them may use these things. But it cannot strictly be said that when he does so he is exercising his own proper or individual power over Nature....What we call Man's power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by. Again, as regards the powers manifested in the aeroplane or the wireless, Man is as much the patient or subject as the possessor, since he is the target both for bombs and for propaganda. And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

As “The Abolition of Man” was written seven decades ago, we cannot fault Lewis for failing to foresee genetic surgery, therapies applied directly to the embryo, or abortion. Yet all of these are now being exercised to circumscribe the possibilities available to our successors: our children.

---

Few persons would dare to argue that, if it’s possible to free our children from the burdens of genetically borne handicaps or diseases, nevertheless we should refrain from doing so – and I am not one of them. But how shall we comport ourselves in extremis? When the handicap is uncorrectable – when the disease cannot be extirpated – when despite all our best intentions and efforts, the child will either be born “imperfect” or not at all...what then?

Sarah Palin made her choice. She was widely derided for it – even condemned in some circles, including by one “Objectivist” commentator who argued that it is selfish to allow a Down’s Syndrome baby to be born.

Needless to say, one can only hold such a position if one denies the humanity of the unborn child. But every child begins as a zygote...an embryo...a fetus...and ultimately, a newborn baby fresh from the womb. As we who cherish life like to say, where’s the dividing line? At what point does the right to life attach to that creature – and why not before then?

Once again, Thomas Szasz is on hand to jar our thinking:

When man believed that happiness was dependent upon God, he killed for religious reasons. When man believed that happiness was dependent upon the form of government, he killed for political reasons. After dreams that were too long, true nightmares...we arrived at the present period of history. Man woke up, discovered that which he always knew, that happiness is dependent upon health, and began to kill for therapeutic reasons.

For a man to kill himself, though a terrible sin, cannot be prevented by any imaginable exertion of benevolence or will. Killing unborn others to prevent them from being “unhealthy” – in some cases after straining for years to bring them into existence at all! – what shall we call that?

Let C. S. Lewis state the conclusion:

The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have `taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho' and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please....

At the moment, then, of Man's victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely `natural'—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever. If the fully planned and conditioned world (with its Tao a mere product of the planning) comes into existence, Nature will be troubled no more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness. Ferum victorem cepit: and if the eugenics are efficient enough there will be no second revolt, but all snug beneath the Conditioners, and the Conditioners beneath her, till the moon falls or the sun grows cold.

Think about it.

Quickies: More Insight Than One Might Expect From The Washington Post

The day ahead of me looks a lot like another Rented Mule day, so allow me a brief comment on this disturbing piece of op-ed:

The latest Hunger Games film, “Mockingjay – Part 1″, is topping the international box office. Although it’s a Hollywood blockbuster aimed at young adults, it presents potentially quite subversive ideas of mass revolution, economic sabotage and the populist fight against oligarchy.

These themes of popular uprising are particularly relevant in light of the current civil unrest happening across the world from the streets of Hong Kong to those of U.S. – the latest Hunger Games has tapped into a certain zeitgeist of global rebellion. Thailand’s pro-democracy protestors have even directly borrowed the movie’s three-fingered symbol of resistance in their own struggles against a repressive regime. Adding fuel to this fire, one of its main stars Donald Sutherland recently declared: “I want Hunger Games to stir up a revolution.”

Despite these heady sentiments, the film’s depiction of revolution is astonishingly simple, an adolescent vision of toppling an “evil” authority figure. Sure, this isn’t surprising as it’s meant for young adults, but in the context of political spillover this anti-authoritarian vision becomes more troubling. It reinforces prevailing Western ideas of social change – fastening on the idea that all one needs do is eradicate the enemy. And worryingly, it appears that this sort of adolescent rebellion isn’t just consigned to teenage entertainment, but also increasingly forms our real adult fantasies.

It is an unfortunate fact of history that “Revolutions, as long and bitter experience reveals, are apt to take their color from the regime they overthrow.” (Richard H. Tawney) For a revolution to bring about conceptual, structural change in the shape of a society:

1. It must command the allegiance of an overwhelming majority of those whose government is being toppled;
2. They must oppose that government on principle: i.e., for ideological rather than practical reasons.
3. They must be willing to revolt against the revolutionists, should the latter display a desire to retain power.

That hasn’t been the case very often. Indeed, hearken to H. L. Mencken:

Politics, as hopeful men practice it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance. The American colonists, when they got rid of the Potsdam tyrant, believed fondly that they were getting rid of oppressive taxes forever and setting up complete liberty. They found almost instantly that taxes were higher than ever, and before many years they were writhing under the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Note that that world-famous upheaval didn’t satisfy two of the three conditions enumerated above. Its successes were partial and temporary, swiftly undone by the arrogance and power-lust of those who rose to the levers of State.

Yes, “The Founding Fathers would be shooting by now.” Yet even they commanded the support of no more than a third of the populace. Even they conceded more power to the State than it should be allowed...if, indeed, it should be allowed any at all. And though the Constitution was and remains superior to any other governmental design ever proposed, from the very first it contained the seeds of its own destruction.

Those who have seized power, even for the noblest of motives soon persuade themselves that there are good reasons for not relinquishing it. This is particularly likely to happen if they believe themselves to represent some immensely important cause. They will feel that their opponents are ignorant and perverse; before long they will come to hate them...The important thing is to keep their power, not to use it as a means to an eventual paradise. And so what were means become ends, and the original ends are forgotten except on Sundays.

We have a great deal of work to do before an armed uprising would do more than fleeting good.

Jeb Bush? I Mean, WTF, But...JEB BUSH?!

And he's already out-polling all the other Republicans that have been mentioned as potential presidential candidates!

Can’t we do better than this? Aren’t there enough other generally acceptable candidates that we don’t have to go back to that well?

Or are the differences among them more apparent than real?

He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and, although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of Russia and China.

I’m beginning to wonder whether Shea and Wilson might have struck the jugular.

A Word Of Power

Consider the following snippet from John Conroe’s Forced Ascent:

    With the circle closed, we left the forensics people to collect their data and moved back to the vehicles. A black military-style Humvee had been added to the mix of cop cars, SWAT trucks, and coroner vans. Four men in black suits got out as soon as they saw us, looking every inch like federal intelligence agents.
    “Chris Gordon—Agent Gulden, NSA. Come with us,” the lead agent said. Thirties, completely bald, six-one, one hundred eighty or so, dark eyes, serious demeanor. The other three were younger, two white, one black, all fit and serious.
    “No,” I replied.
    “That wasn’t a request,” Gulden stated, pinning me with his agent-man stare.
    Behind us, I could just about feel the New Jersey troopers absorbing the confrontation.
    “Well, just to be clear, Agent...my no was a general purpose refusal of requests, commands, orders, or directions.”

Does that move you? If so, why? More to the point, do you find it credible? If not, why not?

---

Who, in these latter days of the Republic That Was, has the courage to say No to an agent of the Omnipotent State? Especially one with weapons and backup?

Chris Gordon was willing to say No in the novel cited above because he’s an enormously powerful supernatural creature as well as a fictional character. In the circumstances he faced, very few of us normal types would have courage enough to do so. Yet the time is coming when Americans will be required to shout No at the myrmidons of the State or suffer to have their firearms confiscated.

Cliven Bundy said No to federal agents. He took a large risk in doing so. Yet he prevailed, because the public proved to be on his side...sufficiently so to defend him with even more force than those agents had marshaled against him.

The Oath Keepers who went to Ferguson, Missouri to protect threatened businesses there brought their arms. They refused the commands of federal agents to stand down and disperse. The feds backed down almost at once.

Various state governments are beginning to chorus No at the increasingly tyrannical and unbounded Environmental Protection Agency. The state governments’ armed force is pitiable in comparison with that of Washington...but their residents are another matter, and majority sentiment in those states is strongly behind them.

There’s a rising in progress.

---

While your weapons remain in your hands, you have power, a power best expressed by the single word No. But were you to be deprived of them...what then? Would the State recognize any bounds at all? Or would it finally run roughshod over every last right, however poorly protected it may have been, that we’ve been permitted to retain?

Consider Washington State’s I-594.
Consider New York’s Orwellian-named “SAFE Act.”
Consider the recent confirmation of Vivek Murthy as Surgeon-General.
Consider the Obama Administration’s endorsement of the UN’s despicable Small Arms Treaty.
And consider how little the popular trend in opinion on “gun control” means to the political class we endure.

They’re coming, Gentle Reader. Don’t allow them to soft-soap you, flummox you, or change the subject on you. And when you answer the doorbell and find them on your doorstep, you’ll confront a choice you’d rather not have to face: between No and “Of course, Officer; here they are.”

“The right to buy weapons is the right to be free,” wrote A. E. Van Vogt. The inverse is true as well. Add this, from another moderately well-known writer:

“I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was “No.”

As Robert Anton Wilson has told us, “The State is based on threat.” Were we free of fear of the State and the things it purports to “protect” us against, we would never tolerate it. Thus, to say No to the State is to say I do not fear you. It implies that the speaker has power of his own, and that he’s willing to stand on it despite the power the State has arrayed against him.

Nothing instills fear in the masters of the State quite as effectively as No. Yet there are dangers, severe ones. How many of us are willing to accept those dangers will determine whether freedom can be saved from the wolves striving to devour it...whether we might embrace the anarchist alternative after all.

How do we measure up to the standard set by those who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to the quest for freedom?

A time for reflection and examination of conscience is upon us.

UPDATE:The Oath Keepers that went to Ferguson did comply with local police commands to relinquish their posts. I was unaware of this until just now.

Cowardice: A Midweek Rumination

Old friend Pascal recently wrote with some thoughts:

Does cowardice fall in any way in the province of one of the 7 mortal sins? Does courage fall within the purview of one of the 4 cardinal virtues?

Look. We clearly have Prog shock troop leaders in the WH. They are mounting further provocations daily. The scope and enormity of their campaign may slowly dawn on its victims. They are seeking confrontations, and then what?

But as to cowardice in the past, when something might have been done with less dread, that's my thoughts now and worrying about its consequences.

IMHO, it came to this due in great part to a lack of courage of members of society to fight the other ever more prominent fostering and displays of sins that you discuss all the time.

Orchestrated PC was certainly involved in castrating a great number. Could it have been fought better if cowardice was well-tied to the mortal sins? I don't know. But now that I think of it, it greatly troubles me.

If there’s a better topic for deep in the Advent season, I can’t imagine what it might be.

---

Is cowardice a sin? As it’s as contentious a matter as “torture,” I would venture to say: not always. I can easily think of instances where deliberately fleeing from combat or confrontation is the wisest available course. Yet there’s at least one case in which cowardice constitutes a moral default – a sin of omission.

To deny one’s faith out of fear for one’s temporal life is a sin, perhaps the only sin that’s on a par with suicide. There are other cases of seeming cowardice that appear to me to be sinful, but in some of those, the judgment of the individual involved is likely to be the deciding factor. God allows us to follow our own consciences without penalty, if we do so out of sincere conviction.

Moral courage – the willingness to act upon one’s own sincere convictions about right and wrong, without soliciting or requiring the approval of others – is exceedingly rare in our time, for reasons I hardly need to tell any intelligent Gentle Reader about. (I don’t have any other kind, do I?) Inversely, moral cowardice – the tendency to say and do nothing even when in the actual presence of evil – is quite common. That strikes me as entirely consistent with the common tendency to pooh-pooh the concept of moral courage: obliteration by derision.

The clearest example of moral cowardice publicly visible today holds regular sessions on Capitol Hill. I daresay I needn’t be more specific than that.

---

Hearken once more to the great Clive Staples Lewis:

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”

Courage comes in several varieties. If I may quote one of my own works of fiction:

    It was an ordinary July evening in Onteora: hot, damp, the air too still, the black gnats too numerous. Most of the city's residents had retreated behind closed doors and powered up their air conditioners, then turned their television sets up high to mask the compressor noise. On an unlit street in the abandoned part of the city, Joseph Follett and Lafayette Buskey were enjoying a special pleasure, raping a teenage girl who had wandered onto their turf.

    They had cut away her jeans and panties, stuffed the scraps of the panties into her mouth, and bound them there with a double winding of packing tape. Buskey knelt on her arms and held a knife to her throat while Follett violated her at his leisure. They had changed places once already. Perhaps they would do so again before the fun was over. Neither had bothered to conceal or disguise his face.

    They had been at it perhaps ten minutes when a quiet patter of footsteps from the far end of the street alerted the merrymakers that they were not alone. Both looked up to see the onrush of a short, slight figure, bearing down upon them.

    Buskey had turned toward the sound but had not yet risen when the runner braked and planted. His right foot lashed out in a powerful placekicker's arc, catching Buskey squarely beneath the jaw. The snap of Buskey's spine resounded the length of the street. He flipped backwards and lay on the sidewalk, twitching spasmodically.

    Follett had pulled away from the girl, drawing his own knife. The runner turned to face him.

    "Keep back, motherfucker."

    The runner made no reply. He advanced.

    Follett dropped into a knife-fighter's crouch. He kept both hands well out in front of him, daring the man to come within slashing distance. The runner halted and watched him, apparently relaxed.

    "So this is your idea of a high old time, eh, asshole?" The runner's voice was soft. The darkness concealed his face. "Wait till some defenseless girl wanders by, take her down, rape her a few times, then gut her like a deer? Not much to take home from it, though. Not like a Grand Avenue mugging or a good B and E."

    The young tough snarled. "What do you know about B and E?"

    The runner's eyebrows rose. "Isn't that how you make your living?" He gestured at Follett's crotch. "I mean, that thing dangling from your fly isn't big enough for you to make it as a gigolo."

    Upon being reminded that his dick was still hanging out of his jeans, Follett looked down at his crotch.

    The runner whirled and kicked again. His toe caught the elbow of Follett's knife arm. The elbow cracked and bent the wrong way, and the knife flew from the hand that held it. The young thug spun and dropped to the pavement with a piercing shriek, clawing at the rough asphalt.

    The runner stepped forward to stand over his victim. Stray rays from the headlights of a car passing on a connecting street revealed the runner's expression. It was that perfection of rage that resembles perfect calm.

    "Well, so much for the muggings and B and Es. Think you can make a living as a rapist? I mean, you're going to need a new helper and all. Maybe two or three. Big nut to carry."

    The runner straddled Follett's body and lowered himself to a squat, all but sitting on the thug's belly.

    "Who the fuck are you, man? You got no business here!" Follett's voice was an agonized hiss.

    The runner pursed his lips. "Business? No. I was just out for a walk, and it went on a little longer and farther than I intended. I don't get into the city much. It's not my favorite place. But here I am, and here you are, and thereby hangs a tale."

He paused and sighed. "I knew you were going to kill that girl when you were done with her. If I hadn't been sure of that, maybe I would have handled it another way. Or maybe not. Not that it matters now. May God have mercy on your worthless soul."

    Follett's pain had not displaced all his fear and hatred. He surged in a last attempt to throw his assailant off him as he scrabbled for his knife.

    The runner's right hand arrowed at Follett's face. The heel of that hand crashed into the bridge of Follett's nose, driving the bone into his forebrain with the impact of a well-thrown spear. The rapist's body spasmed once and was still.

    The runner waited for perhaps a minute, peering into the slack face for any indication that the body might still house life. When he was satisfied, he pulled the jeans off Follett's corpse and brought them to the girl, who had remained where she'd been held. She seemed about sixteen, not especially pretty, and frightened beyond all ability to respond. Carefully, he pulled the makeshift gag from her mouth.

    "Where do you live?"

    "Eighty-two Devlin Boulevard," the girl whispered.

    He bent to help her stand, then offered her the jeans. "I'll take you home. Sorry I have nothing else to cover you with."

    She clung to him and began to keen. He coaxed her to step into the jeans, closed the fly and buttoned them at her waist, rolled up the legs so that she could walk, and escorted her down the street, one arm around her shoulders.

    The body of Joe Follett lay still in the middle of the street. On the sidewalk, the body of Lafe Buskey twitched at lengthening intervals as the life finished seeping out of it.

***

    Louis was beyond astonishment.

    "You were watching."

    Loughlin nodded. "And for a few days after, until I was certain you were the genuine article. Even then you knew to kick, not punch."

    "I never saw you."

    "You weren't supposed to. I've practiced invisibility until I can almost make you forget my presence while you're staring at me. It's a useful talent for moving through cities and such."

    "But why, Malcolm? Why do you do it at all?"

    "You're not going to like the answer."

    Louis stared hard into his friend's eyes.

    "I need to know."

    Loughlin told him.

***

    Louis sat very still. Afternoon had given way to evening, and the trailer had grown dark. Loughlin watched him steadily.

    "Unless this is how you show hysteria, you're taking it a lot more calmly than I expected."

    "I'm all right." Louis tried to shake off his gathering fatigue. He'd had enough shocks that day to stop an army in its tracks, and rest was far away. "I know better than to doubt you. I should probably get home pretty soon, though, or Christine will panic. So that's the why of it?"

    "Moral courage is the key. Physical courage is fairly commonplace, at least in moderation. Bravery in the face of real danger is rarer, but still common enough that you'll find a few dozen cases of it on any battlefield. But moral courage is rarer than any other human trait."

    "Moral courage?"

    "Courage enough to stand by your convictions and trust in your own judgment. That's what you showed that night. You took it upon yourself to save that girl and to execute the bastards who were abusing her. You didn't wait for some committee of designated bystanders to ratify your decision. You have no idea how rare that is."

Do you find Louis Redmond’s execution of the two rapists admirable or despicable? Do you agree that his decision to do so constituted an exercise of moral courage? Indeed, can a man exhibit any sort of courage if he's a moral coward?

---

A final, tangential thought: If our consciences are truly intended to be our guides, and if I’m correct in my belief that even the most poorly reared individual of normal mental capacity has enough of a conscience to recognize evil, then it’s quite possible that all sins fall into one of the following categories:

• Blasphemies (denial or derision of the supremacy or majesty of God);
• Abuses of others (e.g., murder, assault, fraud, theft, false witness);
• Instances of moral cowardice: to stay one’s voice or hand when confronted by evildoing.

May God bless and keep you all.

Further Thoughts On Torture

As you might have expected, Gentle Reader, the previous essay on this subject elicited a great deal of feedback. Most of that feedback was of the “Are you BLEEP!ing serious?” variety. To those persons, I can only say: Yes, I was and I am. To those who inferred from what I wrote that:

• Torture is an effective way of extracting vital information from a prisoner;
• We can reliably trust governments with the privilege of torturing detainees?

...I can only say: Learn to read.

To save you unnecessary wear and tear on your mouse, here’s what I did say:

• Torture can, in certain circumstances, be morally justified.
• I -- not you, not your half-brother Herman, and certainly not the State, but Francis W. Porretto himself -- would not hesitate to use torture in those circumstances, if I thought it would save innocent lives.

I put my full name to everything I write for a reason: Unlike the multitudes who pop off callously, slanderously, or without thinking but prefer not to be called to account for it, I intend always to stand behind my words. I stand behind the ones in that previous essay. And as the title of this post implies, I have a few words to add to it.

---

Whether or not you deem torture to be potentially justifiable, there are significant problems yet to be solved. The most important of those problems is defining torture, such that we need not be guided by anyone’s opinions about it, or about where and when it’s been done.

Clearly, we cannot allow the supposed object of it to define torture, for he would define it as “whatever I would prefer not to experience.” Neither can we accept a subjective definition, based on the reaction to the object’s treatment, for the same reason. We must have a strict, intensive definition of torture, such that any particular practice can be tested against that definition to yield an unambiguous “It is” or “It isn’t” verdict.

An intensive definition requires:

• A genus, or enveloping category;
• A differentia, a characteristic that sets the defined things apart from all others in the genus.

The genus is “Treatment of an involuntary detainee.” There are few possibilities for a differentia.

Shall we define torture as “Any treatment of an involuntary detainee that causes him pain” -- ? That’s a subjective criterion, as we have no way to distinguish real from pretended pain.

What about “Any treatment of an involuntary detainee that damages him” -- ? I see problems with this, too, owing to the nebulousness of “damage” and the eternally contentious subject of mental or psychological cruelty.

Let’s pass right over “Any treatment of an involuntary detainee that the inflictor would object to having to endure,” for the same reasons. The Silver Rule is important, doubt it not, but it’s hardly a reliable standard for defining torture in a world that knows both sadists and masochists in significant numbers.

Shall we try “Any treatment of an involuntary detainee that damages him permanently” -- ? But there are so many kinds of damage that seem permanent at the moment they’re suffered, yet are healable by time or by artifice. Also, this plays into the “mental cruelty” conundrum.

Many, many persons have put their efforts to this question without arriving at a sturdy definition of torture, so don’t feel too bad if you can’t succeed where the rest of us have failed.

---

Complicating all discussions of torture is the rampant politicization of the subject. It’s been pointed out that the “extraordinary rendition” program began under the Clinton Administration, and that the Democrats had no problem with it at the time but are passionately interested in it now that the odium from it can be loaded onto the Bush II Administration. Beyond that, any definition for what constitutes torture will be contested for that reason: the accusers will want more categories of treatment included in it than they would dream of including were they the accused. Political maneuvering is like that.

This is certainly a good reason not to permit “torture” at the hands of the State...if we could agree on what it is. But when organizations such as CAIR can claim that for a Muslim detainee to be served “haram” meals, or to be confined in a cell whose toilet faces Mecca, or to be compelled to sit in the presence of a naked or half-naked woman constitutes “torture” and receive a respectful hearing, we have a problem that no law or regulation, however cleverly worded, can solve.

---

We should not pass from this topic without considering the effects of torture on the practitioners. It degrades them, and any culture that institutionalizes it, as surely as does slavery. That’s above and apart from the typical popular reaction against it. Such reactions have brought down whole nations whose governments have practiced it. It’s assuredly not something we’d want to make a regular, unquestioned part of wartime operations or penal practice. That makes it all the more important to arrive at a definition for it, albeit no easier to reach one.

---

Finally, as I mentioned in the earlier essay, the efficacy of torture is questionable. The chance of getting reliable information is better in some situations than others, but it’s never guaranteed. Yet the same could be said of any interrogatory technique.

There are ways to improve the efficacy of an information-seeking process that involves unwilling sources. If you have two or more such persons in your custody, you can use mutual confirmation reinforced with punishment for each deceit discovered. That is: If prisoner Smith says “They went North” while his (separately interrogated) comrade in arms Jones says “They went South,” you punish them until their answers match. That’s not guaranteed to produce the truth either, but it has better prospects.

The reinforced-mutual-confirmation approach can be further refined by including questions whose answers the interrogators already know. If the subjects are unaware of which questions those are, they provide “calibration” for the rest of the process, just as questions about one’s name, address, age, and so forth help to calibrate a polygraph session. Yet there will still remain uncertainties, for it’s possible to pre-arrange coordinated answers, at least for a range of questions, with one’s comrades, and to train away one’s tendencies to produce any of the obvious signs of deceit.

Ultimately, the only way to maximize the effectiveness of an interrogation technique, coercive or otherwise, is to get the subject to want to tell the truth, and to get him to tell it in a convincing manner. That’s a standard that can only be asymptotically approached, no matter what methods are employed.

---

Torture, like justice, love, and reality, is a subject beyond any mortal’s powers to exhaust. The most definitive statement I can make about it is that it will remain a field for the fiercest of intellectual and political combat long after I’ve departed this vale of tears. No proposed definition will be accepted by everyone. Innumerable participants in the debate will have axes to grind that will move them to obstruct the discussion, usually by accusing the more serious participants of low motives. Shifts in the political wind will add to whatever intensity the controversy would attain on its own.

Which doesn’t mean the discussion should not continue.

Advent, Anticipation, And Hope: A Sunday Rumination

Remembering my blessings and remaining thankful for them has become more of a challenge for me as I age. The problems of age – pain; infirmity; anxiety about one’s future – are considerable, and the resources with which one can meet them are steadily diminishing. But that might be why old age comes after all the rest of life: so that even the most fortunate of us will be tested to our limits – that we won’t “slide in” to eternal life without ever having known trial or hardship.

Yes, I’m hurtin’ a bit this morning. But I have a few thoughts for you despite that, so stay tuned.

---

For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God. [Job 19:26-26]

Advent is often spoken of as “the season of hope,” yet it stands immediately before the Feast of the Nativity, which occurs every year on the very same date. Hope would seem not to be a factor; we know what’s coming on December 25. (If we were inclined to forget, the chaos around major shopping centers would surely remind us.) It seems more a time of anticipation...preparation...remembrance of what has been and what will someday come again. And it is that as well.

But Advent does inspire hope, for a simple reason: faith requires it.

We who believe celebrate Christmas out of faith, not sure and certain knowledge. We’ve accepted a certain bit of history of the classical world, in which an extraordinary Man preached a New Covenant among the Jews of Judea, was tortured to death for defying the religious authorities of that time and place, and subsequently rose from the dead to confirm His Divinely-awarded authority to say and do what He had said and done.

We who believe hold that that extraordinary Man, Jesus of Nazareth, was God made flesh. But being the limited, temporally bound creatures we are, we cannot prove it. It’s an article of faith; we must hope that we’re correct.

Now go back to Job’s words and look more closely at them.

---

A writer of my acquaintance, Ron Currie, once penned a short story titled “Faith, Hope, Love,” about a widower struggling with grief as he raises his only child alone. (He later expanded and revised it, reissuing it under a new title: “No Epiphanies.”) It began with one of the most striking sentences I’ve ever encountered:

I have given my daughter God.

In the course of that story, the narrator-protagonist, who does not believe, declaims to his buddies that there is no faith; there is only knowledge: “My daughter knows her mother is in heaven. All I know is, she’s dead.”

The protagonist’s misconception of both faith and knowledge is one of the most important of all statements for a Christian to ponder – and Advent is the very best season of all in which to do so.

---

What do we know beyond all possibility of error? I mean, really?

Not bloody much, by my standards.

We speak so easily of knowledge, and with so little justification. We think we know ourselves, despite how often our own bodies, minds and characters have surprised us – even betrayed us. Each of us claims a fund of knowledge upon which basis we ply our trades, yet in nearly every case those trades constitute nothing more than manifestations of confidence, asserted through our actions, that certain previously observed patterns will repeat once more. We listen respectfully as others prattle about “what we know,” whether in the sciences, the soft disciplines, or any other context, when we really should either laugh raucously or absent ourselves to do something useful.

As a matter of fact – what the late Hal Geneen once called “unshakable facts,” that are immune to any possibility of disproof – we know approximately nothing. We can’t even be sure of our next breaths; after all, there’s nothing to prevent all the air from rushing to one corner of the room. All we can say about that possibility is that it hasn’t happened before...we think.

Indeed, our whole lives constitute an act of faith, and a matched act of hope: the hope that by doing what we do, by persevering as what we are, by enduring pain, fatigue, sacrifice, deferral of gratification, disappointment after disappointment, and the myriad uncertainties to which all flesh is heir, things may yet be better than they are at this instant.

We are purely creatures of faith and hope. Under the veil of time, it cannot be otherwise.

---

Here’s a thought for you: A mongoose never imagines that he might be wrong. Neither does a mandrill. Or a meerkat. Or a three-toed sloth. Or a blue-footed booby. Conceiving the possibility of error is a gift and a burden reserved to Man alone.

The lesser creatures cannot conceive of abstractions such as cause and effect. Their lives are wholly guided by the instructions God has written into their natures. That immunizes them against the uncertainties Man must endure.

It also means they have neither the need nor the ability to hope.

Man hopes because he perceives time: sequences of events and patterns that appear to bind them together. We probe the laws of Nature by observation, inference, hypothesis, and experiment. We hope to derive knowledge thereby, even though, as Francis Bacon has told us, it will never be surely and finally ours. Yet we persist. Why?

Because that’s our nature. God formed us to do exactly that. The inferences from that observation are the most staggering a human mind can entertain. The frustrating part is that no imaginable experiment can confirm or refute them. We must proceed – we who elect to believe and to proceed from that belief – on faith and hope.

---

Hope can persist even in the face of the most terrible of “certainties:” that our mortal bodies will someday suffer and die.

Yet that’s not knowledge either. It’s merely what’s happened to every human being who lived and died before us. But just because it’s always happened before doesn’t guarantee that it will always be so. And even if it always will be so, there’s that little conundrum about what comes next.

They who mock Christians and deride our beliefs in an afterlife like to focus on that last business. “How can you know any part of you will survive after death?” they say. I like to reply “How do you know the floor won’t collapse beneath you five seconds from now?” It tends to fluster them, often to the point of walking away.

But that’s where that bit of classical history comes in. We have accounts of a Man who returned from the dead and promised us exactly such an afterlife. We’ve chosen to place our faith in His words as those accounts report them. But we cannot know with certainty that He was correct...or that He existed. Only a very few who saw Him in the flesh could be sure He existed at all...and not even they, as limited and fallible as any of us, could be sure He was what He claimed to be.

We are required to hope.

---

THOMAS MORE: Listen, Meg. God made the angels to show him splendour, as he made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man he made to serve him wittily, in the tangle of his mind. [Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons]

It takes a powerful mind to recognize the difference in kind between Man and the lesser orders. It takes an even more powerful mind to realize and appreciate what a gift and a burden it is.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, one of the foremost public intellectuals of our era and better known to the general public as Pope Benedict XVI, has written that faith is inseparable from doubt. Perfect faith that cannot entertain any instant of uncertainty is possible only to the utterly unthinking. Such persons, if any exist, are hardly human beings, for it is our minds and thought processes that qualitatively divide us from the lesser orders.

But if faith cannot be perfect – if doubt is faith’s constant companion – then faith can only be sustained by hope. Indeed, this is why suicide, the deed that expresses the loss of all hope, is the very worst of all sins. One who has lost hope cannot have faith; he has separated himself from God.

Faith can only be sustained by hope.

---

The liturgical year celebrates Christmas only on December 25, but the Nativity is embedded by implication in all the celebrations and commemorations of the cycle. None of the rest of it would be possible without the Nativity. Granted that it would have little meaning without the Passion and the Resurrection, but those things are premised on the Incarnation of God in human flesh.

All of it – every iota of Christian faith, from the conception of Jesus in the womb of a Nazarene virgin to His Resurrection and Ascension – begins with these words:

    There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judaea, a certain priest named Zacharias, of the course of Abia: and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elisabeth. And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless. And they had no child, because that Elisabeth was barren, and they both were now well stricken in years.
    And it came to pass, that while he executed the priest's office before God in the order of his course, According to the custom of the priest's office, his lot was to burn incense when he went into the temple of the Lord. And the whole multitude of the people were praying without at the time of incense. And there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense. And when Zacharias saw him, he was troubled, and fear fell upon him.
    But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John. And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth. For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb. And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God. And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.
    And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years.
    And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings. And, behold, thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak, until the day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in their season.
    And the people waited for Zacharias, and marvelled that he tarried so long in the temple.
    And when he came out, he could not speak unto them: and they perceived that he had seen a vision in the temple: for he beckoned unto them, and remained speechless.
    And it came to pass, that, as soon as the days of his ministration were accomplished, he departed to his own house.
    And after those days his wife Elisabeth conceived, and hid herself five months, saying, Thus hath the Lord dealt with me in the days wherein he looked on me, to take away my reproach among men.
    And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary.
    And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
    And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.
    And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.
    Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?
    And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren. For with God nothing shall be impossible.
    And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.

[Luke 1:5-38]

Upon the truth of these words we base our Advent faith...and our hope.

May God bless and keep you all.

Day Off

There’s nothing much to write about this morning that I haven’t already drenched with my trademarked drivel, so I’m taking today to work on other things. (There are plenty of such things lying around, mocking me for my fervent promises and my subsequent inattention.) However, if you came here because you desperately need a moment’s distraction or amusement, here are a few insanely adorable pictures of babies with dogs:

”What have you got in there?”

“You’re my bestest friend ever!”

“Hey! He has a flavor!”

“Wow! So does she!”

After a long hard day of cuteness...

Have a nice day.

Leftist traitors and their illusions.

Both the rabid Left and Islam need to remake the Western Civilization in its respective insane image before it moves on with the global part. At the present stage of the project they are commonsense, or tactical allies.

The Left needs moslem immigration to dissolve the cultural, religious, ethnical cohesion of the Western nations. Islam, the classic parasite civilization, needs the Left to facilitate its non-military invasion of the West, thus beside preventing what otherwise would be its certain demise, [and] prepares a stage for the final purge of everything non-Islamic, including the Left.^[1]

There is a delusion that infests the minds of Westerners willing to enter into temporary alliances with demonstrably violent and hostile people. The delusion is that somehow they will end up on top when the goals of the alliance are attained. That their erstwhile allies will turn over all the fruits of victory to them because they are so nice, so decent.

It's similarly amazing how fools feverishly undermine the rule of law and assume that, in the ensuing bankrupt, lawless, discretionary, arbitrary hell ruled by scum like themselves, they will end up in the thin layer of the elite. Whatever unpleasantness befell other people in times past will invariably pass them by because they are good leftists and so sooo special.

Notes
^[1] Comment by MukeNecca on "Is a Country Merely Empty Space?" By Fjordman. Frontpage Mag, 12/11/14.

Thoughts On Torture

"If hooking up one rag-head terrorist prisoner's testicles to a car battery to get the truth out of the lying little camel shagger will save just one Canadian life, then I have only three things to say: Red is positive, black is negative, and make sure his nuts are wet.” – Don Cherry, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commentator and retired head coach of the Boston Bruins

Given the appearance of the Feinstein-led Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee report just this week, it occurred to me that a few words about torture, in both its historical and contemporary guises, might be appropriate.

The various “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the CIA and condemned by the Feinstein report skate an uneven surface, historically. They were certainly meant to cause fear and suffering. They were certainly not meant to permanently injure nor kill the victim. In that regard, they were a far cry from torture as practiced by other cultures and times. But then, our culture is a far cry from those others: it concedes certain matters of principle as being beyond rational dispute.

The point of torture isn’t always interrogation. Sometimes the point is to demonstrate to the honoree’s comrades what could happen to them: i.e., pour encourager les autres. And sometimes – especially in the case of many historical instances of torture – the point is merely to enjoy another person’s suffering and degradation.

The American agents who employed those techniques appear to have been interested solely in information extraction. However, were the techniques deemed licit for continued use, the resulting dynamic would attract genuine sadists to such positions: persons who care only about the pain and terror they can cause. Thus, it was probably for the best that, once the immediate crisis was comfortably behind us, such techniques were ruled to be beyond the pale.

However, the striking contrast between the context of the CIA’s coercive interrogations and the historical use of those (and much worse) techniques should remind us of something:

Quite a lot of persons were eager to do the same and worse to every last American.

---

“Savages have no rights.” – Ayn Rand

Savages torture. Indeed, they maim, mutilate, and kill without moral scruple. Their ignorance and / or dismissal of individuals’ rights is the defining characteristic that sets them apart from civilized men.

They who have chosen to make war against us – against all of us, not merely our government or our military – are savages by that definition. As they grant us no rights, they cannot claim any rights. That frees me of any conscience qualms about what our forces might find it productive or expedient to do to “Islamic fighters” who’ve strained with all their might and cunning to kill us.

Sometimes it’s a good thing for Americans to be reminded of just how high a civilization we’ve built and inhabit. But such a reminder is nearly always by contrast with another, less advanced culture. In the Islamic movement of today, we confront a culture that’s willfully adopted norms 1400 years behind those of the First World, in obedience to the most vicious totalitarian creed ever circulated among men.

Yes, I meant that last sentence exactly as it sounds. Not even the Nazis or the Communists can equal the barbarism and bloodthirstiness of Islam. Those other totalitarianisms were at least animated by a positive-seeming goal. Islam’s goal is exactly and only the reduction of Mankind to uniform seventh-century squalor in submission to an imaginary god opposed to all freedom and temporal happiness.

Islam meets the definition of savagery in all particulars, without qualification.

---

It is often the case that a fictional character will say what a real man would never dare to express, no matter how ardently he might believe it:

    Souhi watched, ashen, as the crew was laid out on the deck. Many of them were dead and others were screaming in madness, trussed up with duct tape.
    “So,” the man who appeared to be the leader said, walking over to him, “I have a few questions.”
    “Go fuck a goat,” Souhi said, spitting at him. “What are you going to do? Send me to Guantanamo? I sleep, I eat, I wait for your Amnesty International and ACLU to free me so I can kill you like the goat dick sucker you are.”
    “No, I’m not going to send you to Guantanamo. Those poor boys and girls have enough dickheads to deal with including, yes, the ICRC, AI, and ACLU. Are you the diver or the assistant driver?” he asked, turning to Kahf.
    “You are a man who licks the cocks of camels,” Kahf said.
    “Oh, wrong answer,” the man said, drawing his sidearm and putting a bullet through the diver’s brain. “Oleg, got your first customer.”
    A winch was lowered down and Kahf’s feet secured to the winch. Then the diver was lifted up and lowered over the side.
    As that was happening, the dead crew were being lifted up, their feet secured to ropes, and then dropped over the side to rest in the water. A spotlight was turned on and two large men lifted Souhi up so he was forced to look at the water.
    “The sharks around here are notorious,” the man said, smiling. “Let’s see how long it takes one to turn up.”
    ...
    “Wanna talk?” he asked mildly. “Let me tell you something, you Islamic fuck. A woman I dearly loved was killed by your kind about two months ago. I can’t really be said to be over that. Now, I dearly want to add you to the frenzy, just push you over the fucking side and be done with it. But, as I said, I won’t kill you. If you tell me the coordinates. If you tell me now, you can leave this ship with all your limbs intact. But when I tell them to lift you up, you are going into the water. So you want to tell me? Come on, it’s just a few numbers. I know you know them. You’ve got them memorized. You punch them in and erase the track after you’ve done the pickup.”
    “No,” the driver said, whimpering.
    “God, you people are sooo stupid.” He straightened up and gestured.
    “Please!” the driver said as he was lifted into the air. “You cannot do this to me!”
    “Did I listen to any of the rest of them?” Mike asked as the driver was lowered over the side. “Do you listen to the pleas of your victims? To the men whose throats you cut? To the little girls that get raped for the sins of their brothers? Do you care for those you’re starving to death in the Sudan? Did you listen to the pleas of the pilots you dragged through the streets of Mogadishu? Did you jump for joy when the Towers fell? Did you, YOU CAMEL-SUCKING FUCK?”

That’s as good a statement of the rationale for torturing terrorists as I’ve encountered anywhere.

Note that “Souhi” was beyond any rational dispute a terrorist. He had just been captured while attempting to deliver a weapon of mass destruction – nerve gas – to the U.S. mainland, where it would be used by other Muslim terrorists to perpetrate a mass slaughter. He had no claim to any right a civilized man might invoke, having forfeited all his rights when he elected to participate in such a heinous program.

With the lives of unimaginable numbers of innocents at stake, would you hesitate to torture such a man for the information in his head?

---

Islam and its adherents aren’t the only such monsters in the world today. There are others, driven by other ideologies, that would deal death to innocent Americans with equal ruthlessness:

    "Your certainty is impressive," Ryan said. "It allows you to justify your faith in mass murder."
"It's not murder," she said, "when the violence is justified by the revolution. The bourgeois regime being attacked is criminal and inhuman and all who are obedient to it are complicit in its interminable violence. In acts of revolutionary violence against the enemy anyone complicit with the enemy who is killed is guilty of the crime of the enemy. It is not murder."
    "So riding a subway train to work," Ryan said, "is a criminal act punishable by death?"
    "When seen in its true historical context, it certainly is," she said confidently.
    "Everyone on the subway is equally guilty," Ryan suggested.
    "No, not if you go person by person, a maid or janitor is not carrying the same level of guilt as a stockbroker or corporate executive, but revolutionary violence sweeps with an inclusive broom. The statement it makes is bold and absolute and is a warning to all...."
    "And what do you believe in, soldier boy? Gawd?"
    "In the individual and his liberty," Ryan said, rising to the bait."
    "Oh dear, an American. You people are so charming, so quaint," she said, "always the perpetual football players running onto the field to the roar of the crowd and the bouncing breasts of the cheerleaders."
    "You're an American, aren't you, Ms. Garvin?" he asked.
    "Ah, no," she said. "I stopped thinking of myself as that, as an American when I was a teenager. That's what we call 'the normal maturation process' these days, soldier boy. Sorry you missed it."
    "So you're not an American," Ryan said. "What are you?"
    "I'm a citizen of the world," she said.
    "That's a big concept," Ryan said.
    "It's basic," she said. "You must have missed it while you were attending your ROTC meetings."
    "I guess I did," Ryan said. "That would explain why I'm still just an American with a silly belief in freedom."
    Garvin laughed.
    "Freedom? You think this America is free? You've got ninety percent of the people glued to their couches gazing like zombies into their televisions and eating non-stop. And then they jump off their couches for five minutes of history when a couple of tall buildings are knocked down in New York. That's the America I see. That's the America the revolution sees. This freedom thing you believe in, soldier boy, is a fairy tale, just like Gawd. History is unfolding right before your eyes and you're running in the opposite direction after the fairies of freedom and the goblins of terrorism. You should run in the direction of revolutionary violence, all of you should, get out in front of it, get off this America thing, because it is dead, a thing of the past. America no longer exists. You just haven't realized it. None of you have....
    "What you people refuse to understand," Garvin said, jumping into the silence that had fallen over the room, "is that this freedom of yours is no more than pitiful self-indulgence at the expense of others. What the revolution does is take the anger and frustration of those who hunger for justice in the world and shape that into purposeful violence. You try to deny that by calling it 'senseless violence' and "mass murder,' but I'm looking at your faces now and I can see those old defenses and the lies that support them draining out of you. You all look like children who have just been told that there is no Santa Claus, and you had really known that all along. You just needed an adult to make it official for you. Well, here I am, kids, giving it to you straight, what you already knew."

[From Martin McPhillips’s extraordinary thriller Corpse In Armor.]

Other ideologies have, of course, demoted persons opposed to them to subhuman, rightless status. In every such case, the inevitable consequence is open, bloody warfare. The rules of war as civilized nations have codified them in the Geneva Conventions are of no interest to such ideologies. In their worldview, much like that of Islam, there are no rights and no noncombatants.

Were you to capture an Allison Garvin, knowing that she was a participant in a plot to detonate a nuclear weapon in a major American city, would you hesitate to torture her for whatever strategic or tactical information she might possess?

---

The efficacy of torture is questionable. There have been documented cases of men confessing to crimes they had never committed simply to get the torture to cease...and torturers aware of that possibility who resolved to continue on to the point of death. But that goes to the utility of torture rather than whether it’s ever morally justified.

When you know...
...that the person you hold is beyond doubt a terrorist...
...that he’s complicit in an ongoing plot to commit mass murder...
...that he would do whatever he pleased to you were your statuses reversed...
...and that he would derive both enjoyment and satisfaction from watching you suffer and plead...

...would you hesitate to torture him for whatever shreds of useful information he might possess?

I wouldn’t.

Think about it.

More Thoughts On Feminist Lunacy

Yes, there’s a lot of it going around these days. Some of it is merely mildly amusing or mildly unpleasant. Some of it is actively life-threatening, as we can see from the witch-hunts inspired by recent, highly publicized but apparently false allegations of rape.

Milo Yiannopoulos has produced yet another impressive piece, this time about a feminist virago so hysterical, so vicious, and so utterly bereft of good sense that were she not demonstrably flesh, I would have assumed her to be a fictional character. I hadn’t heard about this...person previously – I don’t keep in touch with events in Silicon Valley to the extent I once did – but given recent developments among technologists, both on corporate boards and among low-level employees, her activities there come as no surprise.

By any reasonable person's definition, and even by the standards of Silicon Valley, Kane is an abusive engine of discord, creating precisely the opposite conditions to those needed for happy co-operation between the sexes. So how did she land a feature-length profile in Matter, Silicon Valley's long-read organ of choice—even though her paranoia and control freakery eventually screwed up what would probably have been a fawning profile and left journalists and readers alike aghast at her childishness and self-destructiveness?

(In case you're not familiar with the story, follow those two links, which have to be read to be believed. Evidently Matter started calling around, asking people about Kane's personal and professional life in preparation for their profile of her and her work—doing journalism, in other words—and she threw a hissy fit and started defaming and smearing the journalists in question, who were respectable professionals, beyond reproach in their dealings with her.)

That second paragraph is the key. Such harridans cannot bear scrutiny and will play every card in the deck to deflect or evade it. In this they most closely resemble racialist mouthpieces such as Al Sharpton, who receives unbelievable deference from the media but whose personal conduct has been so vile as to merit absolute condemnation. Yet they continue to get unearned attention and respect, mainly because they belong to “certified victim classes” the media has resolved never, ever to cross.

Unearned respect is almost always abused to the detriment of the genuinely respectable and respect-worthy. Shanley Kane is striving to present us with a demonstration.

---

A pair of terms with which employment lawyers will already be familiar, assumption of risk and informed consent, are relevant to much of the feminist slander-slinging today.

He who voluntarily and without inducement enters some place or situation is said to have assumed the risks that pertain to that place or situation. For example, a Christian tourist who decides to travel covertly to Mecca, an Arabian city nominally closed to non-Muslims, has assumed the risks associated with discovery. An unarmed man who ventures at night into an area known to be the haunt of muggers and drug dealers has assumed the risks that come with that territory. Assumption of risk lays the burden of coping with the risks, including all the damages that would fall upon him should those risks be realized, upon the principal’s own shoulders.

A woman who voluntarily goes unaccompanied, unarmed, and otherwise unprotected through a district where a significant number of rapes have been reported in the recent past has assumed the risks of that activity. Though the deed is criminal and should be investigated and prosecuted, nevertheless she has no moral claim to having been “failed” by anyone. Neither can she validly protest, when informed of the stupidity of her decision, that to be so informed constitutes “blaming the victim.”

The other term, informed consent, pertains to decisions taken under inducement. An employer induces his employees to enter his place of business by offering a salary and / or other benefits. A shopkeeper induces customers to enter his store by advertising its existence and / or promoting his wares. The inducement constitutes an obligation on the part of the inducer to inform those induced of any non-trivial risks attached to such behavior. If the inducer can validly claim to have done so to the best of his knowledge and ability, he is at least partially indemnified against any damages that may accrue to those induced from the realization of those risks.

An invitation to a “frat party” constitutes an inducement. But what does “informed consent” come to in such a case?

• Fraternities are populated by young men.
• They almost always feature alcoholic beverages.
• Laws against them notwithstanding, they frequently feature various recreational drugs.
• Young men, with few exceptions, are interested in having sex.
• Young women, with few exceptions, are the persons with whom young men want to have sex.
• Though this might come as a shock to the terminally naive, quite a lot of sex occurs at frat parties.

Just how out of touch, friendless, and intellectually deficient must a young woman be not to know all that before she first sets foot on a college campus? Does such a girl belong in college at all?

This common-sense observation won’t halt the cries about “rape culture” and “patriarchal oppression,” of course.

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The feminist harridans’ diatribes against men et cetera won’t halt until the media, particularly the Main Stream Media, demand that they hew to the same standards that are expected of men. However, the Main Stream Media long ago abandoned all pretense of “objective journalism.” Like the rest of the Left’s coalition of agents, they’ve signed on to an agenda, in part out of conviction but in at least equal measure because in our time, the preservation of coalitions of allegiant customers is a matter of old-format media survival. Indeed, even some of the “new,” online media have become dependent on such ideological patron groups.

This is a devastating criticism of the journalistic trade. It opens wide the question of whether there’s any “news source” whose reporting can and should be believed by default. When the details of such reports include allegations of rape, molestation, sexual harassment, and the like, careers and lives hang in the balance. A heavy moral onus for destroying innocent lives should rest upon those who promote unfounded accusations.

Women, having allowed feminists to redefine them from the “strong” profile they claimed a few decades ago to the “fragile flower” category they were supposedly striving to escape, will be the ultimate victims. Economic forces are already rearranging matters to separate men and women in business and commerce. The legal hazards of marriage and fatherhood have brought about a huge aversion to those things among young men. Socially, young Americans are partitioning themselves into gender-specific camps to a degree unknown since the Victorian Era. Only terminal blindness to foreseeable consequences can account for it; only the opening of millions of women’s eyes to those consequences can undo it.

“You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Retribalizers Part 3: A Special And Specially Threatening Case

Just a few days ago, I wrote:

Metrosexuality, spornosexuality, and the widening gulf between the sexes generally are not the consequences of overpopulation. Indeed, the reproduction rate of the First World has fallen so low that several nations are disappearing as we watch: they’re “going out of business,” not due to lack of “customers” but to lack of “workers.” Nor is this a recent development; its inception can be traced back at least five decades. This leads to some fascinating correlations and investigations.

In America, the traditional masculine ideal was encapsulated in the manly virtues: in essence, the cardinal Christian virtues:

• Prudence,
• Justice,
• Temperance,
• Fortitude,

...unified around a clearly conceived standard of right and wrong, plus the courage required to uphold that standard when it’s challenged in word or deed.

If the cited essay alarmed you, Gentle Reader, it achieved its aim. Today’s tirade will have a different focus.

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Milo Yiannopoulos continues from his earlier essay with this gem of observation and analysis:

[Daryush] Valizadeh agrees with masculinity author Jack Donovan that men have been feminised by a culture that rejects and ridicules male characteristics and habits. "Good luck naming one male role model that men have today that actually helps them become men," he remarks. These thoughts are echoed on occasionally rude but compelling male-oriented blogs, such as the phenomenally popular Chateau Heartiste.

They are also supported by the current state of the sex wars, which are constituted bizarrely. One of the remarkable things about recent high-profile skirmishes with feminists is how few mainstream heterosexual men have been involved. In the GamerGate video games controversy, opposition to "social justice warriors" and their attempts at censorship on Twitter has come from older gay men in public life and younger geeks, gamers and drop-outs; in the case of Matt Taylor, it was geeks and other women.

Straight young men simply don't want to know any more. They're not getting involved. Some women, too, horrified by what lesbianised third-wave feminism claims to do in their name, opt out of the argument. The absurd result is that geeks, queers and dykes are dominating the discussion about how men and women should interact. Jack Donovan, for example, is gay, as is your present correspondent. It's as if gays are the only men left prepared to fight masculinity's corner.

Men want normal relationships that include sex, says Valizadeh. Some of them will read pick-up artist books or go to seminars by people such as Roosh V if they don't get it or need to be trained out of "white knight" behaviours instilled in them by a female-dominated culture. (Men have been taught that being a nice guy gets you laid. It doesn't.)

What strikes a lot of women as strange is how rational and systematic so much of this decision-making is by men. Many young men literally perform a cost-benefit analysis and decide that women aren't worth the hassle. It's girls who lose out in this scenario: men don't need the sustained emotional intimacy that comes with a fulfilling sexual relationship and can retreat into masturbatory pursuits, prostitution and one-night stands much more comfortably.

But that's exactly what it is, from a male point of view: a rational opting out from education, work and marriage by men who have had enough, as a remarkable book by Dr. Helen Smith called Men on Strike warned in July last year.

[Emphasis added by FWP.]

See also many of the essays at The Return of Kings.

The gender war is real.
It’s rapidly growing in scope and intensity.
And it presages the end of society as we older folks have known it.

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If it isn’t obvious from the title, my focus here is on the artificial nature of the gender gulf. It’s a creation of a very small number of gender-war feminists: “angry ugly girls,” as my Vietnamese-American sweetie Duyen likes to style them, who have succeeded by stridency, repetition, and the skillful play of the victim-card in dominating all discussions of male-female relations to which they’ve been admitted.

These are not good people. Their sole aim is destruction, animated by their corrosive envy of those who have what they have not: courage, energy, enterprise, firm morals and ethics, beauty, femininity, love. They don’t intend (and have never intended) to compel the redress any objective injustice. They seek solely to alienate women from men.

Inventions such as “lookism,” “rape culture,” and “patriarchal privilege” are laughable in light of the state of the law, the social and commercial advantages women command over men, and the extraordinary lengths to which men have gone to create a world in which women can be and do whatever they please. Yet an incredible number of men, nearly all of whom ought to know better and have no excuse for acting otherwise, grant the “angry ugly girls” an entirely unearned stature as “the voices of our generation.” Why?

Rotate the question in your mind. Why would nominally intelligent, reasonably aware men deliberately place themselves in subordination to vicious-minded harridans, at least rhetorically in print and on the airwaves? What could they possibly hope to gain by such groveling self-abasement?

Think about it for a moment.

---

There are tremendous ironies in one of the above-emphasized sentences:

It's as if gays are the only men left prepared to fight masculinity's corner.

It doesn’t take a lot of thought to arrive at the reason: Homosexuals have nothing to lose from entering that arena. There are no women to be alienated among their potential sexual-romantic partners. Similarly, a fair number of the most vociferous “angry ugly girls” are homosexuals, because they have nothing to lose from alienating men. (Indeed, it’s possible that the horse was their sexual-romantic uncompetitiveness and the cart was a chosen lesbianism. Women’s sexuality is more fluid than men’s, and adapts more readily in either direction.)

Among the tribalizers driving the gender wars, you will find, standing with the “angry ugly girls:”

• “Beta” males hoping for improved sexual-romantic acceptance from women;
• Hucksters avid for acceptance in the feminist commercial niche;
• Persons with a strongly left-wing political agenda.

You won’t find traditionally masculine men. Indeed, you won’t find much sincerity of any stripe.

---

I call this “a special and specially threatening case” of tribalization because of its potential effect on our future. In particular, it’s depressing reproduction rates throughout the advanced countries of the world. As Mark Steyn has already noted, a people that declines to reproduce...declines. You have no shot at being part of the future if you’re never born, but then, you’re unlikely to care much for the very same reason. However, the consequences for current generations are ominous indeed.

What are your savings worth, in actual purchasing power? What can you buy with them? Why is it available to be bought? Would those dollars in your bank account be worth as much if there were only half as many humans as there are today? How about a third or a quarter as many? Are you sure about that?

The late Phyllis Dorothy James would have some thoughts for you.

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Just as there are many separate cases of tribalization taking place around us, there are many perspectives from which one can approach the tribalization phenomenon. In my view, the most profitable path for analysis is to view it as a quest for gain on the part of the tribalizers, always bearing in mind that “gain” need not be denominated in dollars. Some tribalizers are after power or prestige; others are merely straining to slake their hatred of some perceived enemy. Rare is the case in which the ideological separation of otherwise compatible groups into mutually hostile camps is spontaneous.

In no case is it anything but contemptible and vile.

The Retribalizers Part 2: It’s Not Just About Race

First, an instructive historical citation:

”Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.” – Martin Y. Latsis head of the Ukrainian Tcheka

Along with that, have a personal vignette.

About thirty years ago, I briefly dated a Chinese girl who was here on a student visa. Ming told me many stories about life in Communist China, some of them unbearably painful to relate...and to hear. The attitude the Communists strove to inculcate in the common people was a highly accurate reflection of the Latsis quote above: they were to evaluate a neighbor, not on the basis of his conduct but on the basis of his class, with some trades and classes rigidly predefined as “enemies of the people.” Thus, if you practiced one such trade, or if you were deemed a member of one such class, you were condemned ab initio, socially if not legally.

Ming’s mother had been a teacher – one of the “enemies” trades. Enormous pressure was put upon her to abandon it. She wound up operating a tea farm that barely kept her alive, in part because of the two government-assigned “helpers” that monitored and hindered her at every instant.

How, you may ask, does a nation that anathematizes teachers progress materially? A good question. My guess is that the favored ones were channeled into the education of the offspring of the political elite. But there is no question that the Communist regime prospered politically by giving the people faceless classes of enemies to hate – and that the fortunes of common Chinese were negatively affected by the policy.

Food for thought.

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Tribalization is a tactic both for forming blocs that can be herded into political coalitions, and for creating depersonalized enemies that one’s allegiants can be encouraged to hate. Indeed, a tribe would lack all significance were there neither suspicion nor animus directed against those outside the tribe. When we address a collectivizing trend in our politics, it’s best to ask both questions: not merely how the tribe is being defined, but how it defines and views any adversary tribes.

In the case of contemporary (i.e., gender-war) feminism, generic “men” are defined as the adversary: a supposedly monolithic bloc that obeys conscious and unconscious tendencies to “oppress” women. It’s essential to the feminist project that she who defines herself as a feminist accept that as a postulate. By implication, if she associates herself with a man or men, they must somehow be qualified as exceptions – in essence, they must be vetted and accepted as “women with Y chromosomes.”

In the case of Occupy-style tribalism, the adversary tribe is “the rich:” an undefined and undefinable category of persons who have supposedly contrived to profit from others’ deprivation and misery. An Occupier is encouraged to make that a principal tenet of his worldview and (of course) his political stance. That he benefits personally, often greatly, from the achievements of “the rich,” conveyed to him by the market process, must not be permitted to intrude upon his consciousness.

Viewed thus, tribalism is a species of collectivism strongly flavored with conspiratorialism. Though the aspect of conspiratiorial thinking that posits conscious plotting of some against the rest is often absent, the attitude remains immensely useful to the retribalizers: the hucksters and grievance-mongers who labor to divide us into mutually suspicious tribes.

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The most unfortunate thing about tribalism in society and politics is that it cannot be met head on. There is no salvation from any sort of collectivism in “counter-collectivism.” That’s merely a short route to open warfare. The sole remedy, as frustrating as it is to contemplate, lies at the individual level. Men of good will must individually and repeatedly demonstrate that they are such, in the ordinary course of life among other men, no matter what perverse social or political notions they or their neighbors may hold.

America has no shortage of men of good will, but that alone is insufficient. Tribal boundaries are not easily lowered or dissolved, especially when the retribalizers are laboring to raise and strengthen them. Atop that, there are pro-survival aspects to certain categorical suspicions and cautions, as painful as that is to admit. ("I can be walking down the street at 2am in Jackson Mississippi, hear footsteps behind me and be relieved it is a white man behind me." – Jesse Jackson) Survival will always trump more abstract political considerations.

The damage tribalism has done to American society is extensive and severe. It will take many millions of persons quite a long time to repair; though trust is slow to form and hard to cement in place, it can be shattered in an instant. Nor will the retribalizers kindly suspend their efforts while we work to undo them.

Pray.

Conversations

FWP: (leaps from his seat at the kitchen table and sneezes volcanically)
CSO: Why do you always do that?

FWP: Do what?
CSO: Get up and run before you sneeze.

FWP: It’s the responsible thing.
CSO: Huh?

FWP: C’mon, sweetie! You have a nose. Didn’t you learn the Rules of Responsible Nose Handling?
CSO: Uh...

FWP: There are four: First, assume all noses are always loaded. Second, keep your finger off your nose until it’s time to fire. Third, never point your nose at anything you don’t want dead. Fourth, know your target and focus on it. Everyone is supposed to know them before being issued his first nose!
CSO: (unprintable)