Liberty's Torch

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Apologetics: A Coda

Let’s have a few home truths, the sort Junior once learned at his mother’s knee:

People do things for a reason.
Some people are impossible to please.
Therefore, it’s impossible to please everyone.
Therefore, your highest priority shouldn’t be to please others.
Now finish your homework, brush your teeth, and get ready for bed!

(Yes, #5 is rather difficult to square with the previous four. That’s actually why I included it. You’ll see in a moment.)

America has a national malady of sorts. It consists of the desire to be seen as a benevolent power that will always come to the rescue when the cause is just. Thus we’ve embraced the “world policeman” role for seven decades. We’ve also added “world do-gooder” to our responsibilities, such that other nations now expect that the U.S. will send relief forces and resources speeding toward any disaster anywhere. The current desire to renounce those roles, and to reserve our power and resources for our own national interests, is part of why Donald Trump is now the president.

That national malady flows from a personal weakness too many of us share: the tendency to make being liked and approved by others our highest priority. That’s the weak spot the Left has attacked at every opportunity for fifty years: our desire for others’ approval of our actions. But no matter how tolerant and generous we are, it’s never enough. It can’t be enough, for they keep attacking.

We’re tired. Every man of good will in this nation is laden with near to unbearable fatigue. We’ve been playing Atlas, mostly reaping envy and resentment for our efforts, and wondering what the hell we did that was so wrong.

What was so wrong was making other people the ultimate judges of our actions.

Do you remember the Christmas Tsunami of 2004? I do. I remember it well, including the ridicule Europeans – including Europeans in the U.S. at the time – heaped on us for sending an aircraft carrier to the scene:

     Today, during an afternoon conference that wrapped up my project of the last 18 months, one of my Euro colleagues tossed this little turd out to no one in particular:
     "See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, there’s a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier..."
     After which he and many of my Euro colleagues laughed out loud.
     And then they looked at me. I wasn't laughing, and neither was my Hindi friend sitting next to me, who has lost family in the disaster.
     I'm afraid I was "unprofessional", I let it loose --
     "Hmmm, let's see, what would be the ideal ship to send to a disaster, now what kind of ship would we want?
     Something with its own inexhaustible power supply?
     Something that can produce 900,000 gallons of fresh water a day from sea water?
     Something with its own airfield? So that after producing the fresh water, it could help distribute it?
     Something with 4 hospitals and lots of open space for emergency supplies?
     Something with a global communications facility to make the coordination of disaster relief in the region easier?
     Well "Franz", us peasants in America call that kind of ship an "Aircraft Carrier". We have 12 of them. How many do you have? Oh that's right, NONE. Lucky for you and the rest of the world, we are the kind of people who share. Even with people we don’t like. In fact, if memory serves, once upon a time we peasants spent a ton of money and lives rescuing people who we had once tried to kill and who tried to kill us.
     Do you know who those people were? That's right Franz, Europeans.
     There’s a French Aircraft carrier? Where is it? Right where it belongs! In France of course! Oh why should the French Navy dirty their uniforms helping people on the other side of the globe. How Simplesse...
     The day an American has to move a European out of the way to help in some part of the world it will be a great day in the world, you sniggering little f**knob..."
     The room fell silent. My Hindi friend then said quietly to the Euros:
     "Can you let your hatred of George Bush end for just one minute? There are people dying! And what are your countries doing? Amazon.com has helped more than France has. You all have a role to play in the world, why can't you see that? Thank God for the US Navy, they don’t have to come and help, but they are. They helped you once and you should all thank God they did. They didn’t have to, and no one but them would have done so. I'm ashamed of you all..."
     He left the room, shaking and in tears. The frustration of being on the other side of the globe, unable to do anything to assist and faced with people who could not set aside their asininity long enough to reach out and help was too much for him to bear. I just shook my head and left. The Euros stood speechless.

One American, unconcerned with his European colleagues’ opinion of him or his country, issued a brilliant dressing-down that silenced a roomful of them. That’s what’s possible when you don’t care what others think of you.

I also remember a truly bile-stirring denunciation of the Bush Administration’s response by Leftist critic Robert Rivkin:

     Why hasn’t the Bush administration shown some imagination in convincing the world that Americans really care and are prepared to make a small sacrifice to help victims of this astonishingly destructive natural calamity? In the wake of the administration’s default, why hasn’t the Democratic “opposition” proposed something that will demonstrate to the world that Americans want to help and are not “stingy”? Especially these days, a dramatic proposal to assist victims of mass catastrophe might also improve our country’s tarnished image in many places in the world.
     Here’s a simple proposal that would capture the world’s attention, and which a majority of Americans would almost certainly support. President Bush should announce that because of the colossal losses suffered by millions of people in Southeast Asia and East Africa, he will make an exception to his promise not to raise taxes. Bush should propose a Tsunami Disaster Relief Surtax for 2004 and 2005, with very simple components that everyone can understand.
     For example, the president could propose a flat $50 surtax applicable to every American tax return with an adjusted gross income of between $25,000 and $40,000; a flat $75 surtax on every tax return with an adjusted gross income between $40,000 and $80,000; $100 for incomes over $80,000, and so on. This small assessment for two years would produce many billions of dollars, which could be placed into a fund which would support infrastructure repair and development over a period of at least 10 years in the stricken countries.

(The original article is no longer reachable. The above is a transcription that appeared in a 2004 article at Eternity Road.)

Yes, Gentle Reader, you read it right. Rivkin was actually proposing a tax on Americans specifically to benefit – drumroll, please -- non-Americans! If memory serves, we fought a bloody war to be free from that. Of course, I wasn’t around that long ago, but the histories all agree on it.

But I want to draw your attention to one specific phrase in that disgusting article:

...a dramatic proposal to assist victims of mass catastrophe might also improve our country’s tarnished image in many places in the world.

In other words, Americans should be saddled with a tax specifically so that non-Americans will like us more!

Yet Leftists wonder that we want no more of them.

No one admits publicly, and hence public opinion does not admit, that ingratitude is the norm. It is astounding that countless benefactors allow themselves to be persuaded over and over that ingratitude with the resultant hatred is a rare and special case. -- Helmut Schoeck

If insanity consists of endlessly repeating the same actions but expecting the results to change, it is insane to think that the pattern of so many years, and so many well-meant benevolences, will ever be reversed. We compound the insanity when we allow others to make us feel guilty about their envy and resentment. We complete the tailoring for our straitjackets when we broaden and intensify our efforts in response.

Remember Home Truth #1: People do things for a reason. The Left – especially its spokesvermin – issue their denunciations of our “lack of compassion” because for many years it’s worked to get them what they want. They call us racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and any other trendy names they can think of because it impels us to apologize – nay, to grovel, to beg forgiveness and do penance. Yet no matter how we respond, they refuse to grant their approval, much less absolution for our imaginary sins. Why? To keep the tactic usable!

That’s what we get – as individuals and as a nation – for making others’ approval our highest priority.

I could go on in this vein for many thousands of words more, but as the overarching lesson should be clear by now, I’ll spare you. However, one recent incident deserves special mention.

At Mass this past Monday – yes, I go to Mass every day – Father Henry Vas, normally an excellent homilist, said something so thoughtless, so stupid, and so far outside his proper sphere that I wanted to charge the pulpit. What he said, quite briefly, was that if the richest 5% of Mankind would just share what we have with the rest, “we could eliminate poverty.”

I’m not sure how I resisted, but somehow I suppressed the urge to rise from my seat and shout “Oh yeah? For how long?” If we hadn’t been in the middle of a sacred ceremony, I think I would have done so. At my next opportunity, I intend to “tax” him about it.

Have you been present at any similar incidents? What did you say in reply to such arrogant imbecility? More to the point, what will you say – if anything – at the next such occasion? Will you be willing to challenge such lunacy, or will you be more concerned with being liked and “keeping the peace?”

Have a nice day.

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Apologetics Part 3: What You Get For Being Apologetic

Part 1 and Part 2 of this series have already generated some discussion. It’s a discussion we desperately need, as the greater part of the Left’s attack strategy is based on getting normal, innocent people to feel guilty. If that element of Leftism could be defeated, the edifice would totter. Indeed, it might fall from that alone.

He who apologizes has implicitly accepted a verdict of guilt. There’s no evading it. Subsequent statements that “I was just being polite!” will be ignored; no one will ever hear them. The only way to stay out of the trap is not to apologize, pro forma or otherwise.

As it happens, we have some excellent recent demonstrations before us.

Politeness, when exercised asymmetrically, is a mistake. I contend that the Jordan Peterson video I linked in yesterday’s rant is sufficient demonstration. Clearly, the “trans” and “non-binary” activists who assailed him as a Nazi sympathizer had no intention of being polite. In that case, Dr. Peterson’s penalty for being inappropriately polite was minor: the loss of a little time and some extra wear and tear on his patience. However, many a man who’s been hailed into court as the result of an auto accident has a sadder tale to tell. Consider the following prototypical courtroom exchange from Alexander Rose’s Pay The Two Dollars:

Lawyer: Mr. Blert, if you didn’t cause the whole thing, why did you say you were sorry?
Defendant: What?
Lawyer: Why did you say you were sorry?
Defendant: Sorry?
Lawyer: Sorry.
Defendant: Good heavens, the man was bleeding and I simply said—
Lawyer: Were you sorry about his bleeding or about your carelessness?
Defendant: Carelessness? Why, he was driving with his arm around this girl! How could I be careless?
Lawyer: It’s possible. Now, did you also say...

Though the above is fictional, it illustrates nicely what well-meaning remarks made in the wrong context can cost...and the cost could be higher. The following is from a real murder case:

     A recent murder trial was based entirely on circumstantial evidence. A Mrs. Brown had a small store in a small town. One fine day her son, who was a truck driver, stopped his truck outside the store, came in and said, “Mom, I’m going in the back room for a minute.” She was busy with customers for some time.
     Suddenly two shots rang out. The horrified woman rushed into the back room and found her son slumped down on a davenport with two gunshot wounds in his chest. There was no one else in the room, there was no gun in view. The only other door in the room was one that opened onto a side street.
She called the police and they took her and her son to the hospital. When the doctors told the police the man was dying, the police had the mother speak to him and ask him who had shot him. He said, “Watt shot me,” and died.
     A Gordon Watt was promptly picked up by the police. They interrogated him and found that he knew the deceased, that they had quarreled over Watt’s attentions to Brown’s wife, and Watt admitted having been within one block of the scene of the shooting at the time it occurred.
     He was indicted and tried for murder.
     [Ibid.]

As it happens, Gordon Watt was found innocent...but his “attentions to Brown’s wife” and the resulting quarrel could have put him into a gas chamber. Yet what developed during the trial was that Watt had merely been politely, pleasantly attentive to Brown’s wife as she regaled him with the details of some household adventure. He’d shown ordinary courtesy to a garrulous woman in a social setting. Utterly innocent! But it put a man’s life in jeopardy.

A well-meant pro forma apology could impose a similar cost.

If you’re not yet familiar with this well-meant bit of prose from a Google employee, please take a moment to read the thing. Note how apologetic, how utterly forelock-tugging to the Left it really is. James Damore, who wrote it, meant no harm to anyone. He did his cringing best to perform ritual obeisance to all the Left’s shibboleths, especially about that most absurd of the modern myths, “gender equality.” Yet he lost his job over it.

Apologies did James Damore no good whatsoever. His statements were deliberately distorted to suit the Left’s purposes...including the ambitions of Google’s freshly hired “vice president for diversity” Danielle Brown, to appear important and “on the job.”

Brown’s memo makes plain that none of Damore’s hairsplitting could possibly have aided his defense:

“Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.”

As Oregon Muse says at AoSHQ, “In other words, shut up. So her whole statement, translated, reads: ‘All of us here at Google are in 100% favor of free speech and diversity of opinion. Except for this guy. He needs to shut up.’”

Lawrence Summers could have told James Damore about the futility of apologies. So could James Watson.

There have been innumerable demonstrations that to the Left, any sign of weakness from an adversary is a signal for immediate, all-out attack. Despite the utter innocence – from any perspective – of the great majority of its targets, the Left attacks to destroy its target and to intimidate any like-minded into silence. As it has a sympathetic and wholly compliant media on its side, it usually carries the day. The exceptions have all been men who stood fearlessly for their expressed convictions and refused any word or deed of obeisance.

So why apologize? Why qualify your statements in a futile attempt to avert the Left’s thunderous wrath? Why not be “out loud and proud?” Especially as it seems to make your odds of survival a trifle better.

Think it over.

Altrustic lawyer?

And how does a recently bankrupt and unemployed Imran Awan wind up with a high-priced lawyer to defend him who is associated with the Clintons? Would that kind of lawyer even take a relatively minor bank fraud case if that were all that is involved?

"The Tale of the Brothers Awan. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz in the middle of a new scandal." By Philip Giraldi, The Unz Review, 8/8/17.

It's yuge.

The resort to weird propaganda ploys, accusing Vladimir Putin of ‘rigging’ the US Presidential elections, has paralyzed US domestic policy, turning Washington into an insane asylum of continental dimensions.

"Washington and Brussels: Running in Reverse." By James Petras, The Unz Review, 8/1/17.

Monday, August 7, 2017

Apologetics Part 2: No Respect

No, this won’t be a paean to Rodney Dangerfield, as much as he deserves one.

I’ve just watched a rather illuminating Jordan Peterson video. Dr. Peterson, a clinical psychologist who also lectures at the University of Toronto, is a brilliant man who articulately expresses the traditional values and views of Western societies. It would be a mistake, I think, to classify him politically; Canada is not the U.S., and at any rate I have yet to hear him speak specifically about political matters. But his overwhelming sensibility, his most excellent grounding in reality and what may be known with some confidence, suggests an innate personal conservatism: i.e., a belief in moving deliberately if at all, and an unwillingness to bend to fads regardless of their popularity.

I exhort you to watch the video, but just in case you have no time for its 13 minutes and 34 seconds, I’ll summarize it for you. A group of “trans” and “non-binary activists” sought, in their typical fashion, to invalidate Dr. Peterson’s views and disparage him personally. Dr. Peterson made a critical mistake: He treated them with respect: i.e., as if they and their leading, insinuating, deliberately insulting questions deserved his attention. That cost him 13.5 minutes of his time and energy.

This is not an unusual occurrence. Far too many persons with a public profile strive to treat everyone with respect. But that, too, is a mistake. (Moreover, Dr. Peterson is aware of this.) There are several categories of persons who should not be treated with respect – indeed, who must not be so treated.

If Smith insults Jones, whether directly or by imputation, he forfeits all claim to Jones’s respect. If Smith declares himself to be of a category that has made insult, slander, and denunciation its tools, then as soon as he shows his colors, Jones is within his rights to deny Smith an instant of his time, much less the smallest particle of respect. Moreover, in doing so, Jones leagues himself with the good guys.

The “trans” and “non-binary” types who attempted to conflate Dr. Peterson’s sentiments with Nazism made plain their intentions and their alignments within the first 60 seconds. At that point, the appropriate response to them was:

“I have no time for you. Good day.”

Dr. Peterson would have been within his rights to issue that response. (Eventually he did say something of the sort.) You must not grant respect to someone determined to damage you, your reputation, or anything else to which you have a just claim. Your grant of respect, even if it’s merely in the form of courteous, attentive treatment, will be wielded against you.

If Smith has nothing to offer Jones – no value that makes Smith’s existence even temporarily valuable to Jones– then Jones need not treat with Smith. For Smith to demand Jones’s attention, yet offer nothing that Jones would want in recompense, is an attempt to steal Jones’s time and energy. It’s a theft indistinguishable from the theft of property, for the ultimate cost of all things is the time and effort required to acquire them. The old plaint “Who can I sue to get those five minutes of my life back?” recognizes this implicitly.

Many are they who would steal every second of your life from you. People who want what you can do for them but who disdain to offer you anything in return (perhaps because they have nothing to offer). Respect these? Great God in heaven, why? wouldn’t it wiser to strain to keep them at distance, perhaps in another county?

One of Robert A. Heinlein’s pithier maxims comes to mind:

“It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with the leech who wants "just a few minutes of your time, please—this won't take long." Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time—and squawk for more!
So learn to say No—and to be rude about it when necessary. Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you.”

Note that it doesn’t matter why “the termites” want your time and attention. If you refrain from granting them respect by default, they can’t get their teeth into you. There’s a great deal of satisfaction in telling them to “buzz off.” If done with others watching, you might inspire them to do likewise.

Enemies and time thieves are important categories, but we must not neglect a third no-respect category whose numbers appear to be swelling as we speak: the deluded.

There are a fair number of deluded persons in the world. Not all of them are plainly “a quart or two below the dipstick.” Some of them present a facade of functionality. However, when their delusions surface, they can become irritating, time-consuming, and occasionally dangerous.

In the most abstract terms, a delusion is a belief or conviction that’s at odds with objective reality. There are as many possible delusions as there are correct beliefs and convictions: simply negate the valid one to reach a delusion. However, as no one’s knowledge or experience is infinite, it’s possible that Smith’s delusion falls outside the scope of Jones’s knowledge and experience. Therefore, Jones might not be able to classify Smith as deluded immediately upon Smith’s statement of the substance of his delusion.

My knowledge and experience certainly aren’t infinite. Over the years I’ve been acquainted – in most cases, very briefly – with deluded persons of several kinds. Yet I’ve been able to identify them as deluded swiftly in nearly every case. There are reliable symptoms deluded persons seldom learn how to conceal. Perhaps the most important one is the high priority they place upon their delusion. That routinely manifests in a persistence about pressing it on others that’s usually absent from non-deluded persons.

Unless you’re a mental health professional and are being paid for your services at a previously agreed-upon rate, you owe the deluded nothing. You certainly don’t owe them your time, energy, or respect – and as delusions are often contagious, you must not grant them any.

I styled this Part 2 of Apologetics for reasons that might not be entirely obvious. At base, it’s about a verbal habit nearly everyone exhibits:

“I’m sorry, but...”

This is all too frequently the lead-in to a well-earned dismissal of an enemy, a time thief, or a deluded person. No, you’re not sorry. You shouldn’t say you are, even pro forma. As Heinlein said, these people are parasites, whether they’re aware of it or not. Moreover, by remaining conscious of their nature and your perfect right to dismiss them with prejudice, you'll reinforce your self-respect: your appreciation for the place in the world you’ve earned by your own efforts, which your enemies, time thieves, and delusional acquaintances are at pains to erode.

This is a more important step than you might realize. At this time Western man exhibits a critical deficit of self-respect. Ponder the shrift we give to the shrieking, increasingly violent Left. Ponder the accommodation we’ve allowed those who claim to be “transgender,” or even more comically, “transracial.” Ponder the Muslim savages ravaging Europe as Europeans wring their hands and prattle about “tolerance” and “diversity.” You’ll see exactly what I mean.

Apologetics

(Warning! My Gentle Readers have surely already realized from the graphic above that the title misapplies the word apologetics. As a Catholic and a serious student of religion, I’m well aware of what the word really means. You needn’t declaim about it to me. Allow me my little whimsies. Besides, the misapplication is more apparent than real.)

Lately, absolutely everyone seems to be...offended. (To be precise, if you’re not already offended, you’re looking for a reason to be.) That bugs the living shit out of me. I’ve made no secret of that. But what’s worse is the reinforcement the offended ones receive from well-meaning others who misguidedly seek to smooth their feathers.

It must stop – NOW.

Some years ago, in a conversation with the esteemed Chris Muir, I asked him whether he had any difficulties with irritating detractors – trolls, in our contemporary argot – and how he chose to deal with them. Chris’s reply was brief and penetrating. He said that what they wanted was a response; therefore, he refused to give them one. Deprived of the reinforcement they sought, they soon went away.

Priorities! Logic! Maturity! Brilliance! I was, to say the least, impressed. If it works so well for Chris, whose readership numbers in the tens of thousands, it should work for everyone. However, few in the Right make use of it – and the Left knows it.

Rather, not only do we supply the response the troll seeks, we compound the felony by apologizing: i.e., trying to explain ourselves.

That is wrong for at least three reasons:

You’re providing an attacker with what he wants;
You’re expressing contrition for a view it’s your perfect right to hold;
Your attacker isn’t interested in your explanation; he merely seeks to annoy and deflect you.

But believe it or not, it gets worse than that.

He made, in his inexperience, the classic mistake: he tried to explain. Life had not yet taught him how futile that approach is, with men and women alike. He did not know that the only respect-compelling attitude toward any accusation, true or false, is: “Take me or leave me as I am, and be damned!” – Frank Yerby, An Odor Of Sanctity

An apology implies that one has committed an offense. An explanation is an attempt at self-exculpation. Therefore, unless the item of behavior for which you’re considering issuing an apology is forbidden by the Ten Commandments, suppress the urge. Unless the person who appears to want an apology from you is a loved one or a minor child, the proper response is quite different:

(The minor child should merely be ignored. He needs the life lesson before he encounters someone carrying a weapon. In the case of a person of mature years who’s merely acting like a child, try sarcasm: e.g., “I’m sorry that wasn’t covered by your third grade teacher.” It probably won’t work, but it might make you feel better. As for a loved one, there’s no remedy but blatantly indifferent silence. Let her sulk.)

I’ve ranted about this before, of course. Yet the apologies continue to pour forth – and from people who have nothing to apologize for and should know better than to issue them. Apparently, no one was listening.

FOR THOSE WHO STILL DON’T GET IT:

If you’re apologizing for something you sincerely believe or consciously meant to do, you’re the victim. Not the person demanding the apology. He’s deflecting you from your priorities to his. If you permit it, you’ll have only yourself to blame.

Just this morning, I encountered a variation on the unjustified apology that deserves special mention:

Capitalism may not be perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than anything else. – Chris Blake

This is not meant as a slam at the author. I like Chris. I’ve enjoyed visiting his site for several years. But like many others in the Right who write for the Web, he sometimes qualifies a perfectly accurate statement with an apologetic forelock-tug. It’s a bad habit, especially given the slipperiness of words such as perfect.

“Capitalism may not be perfect.” Meaning what? That it doesn’t give everyone exactly what he wants, when he wants it, at a price he’s happy to pay? Anyway, what is capitalism that it should require anyone’s defense?

Capitalism is economic freedom. It’s the way we pursue our various priorities when we’re left free to do so. Would anyone ever feel a need to say that freedom “may not be perfect?” Would you listen respectfully to whatever might follow such a claim?

Yet Chris is not alone in feeling the need to add that qualifier to his statement of preference for capitalism. Virtually everyone does it, including many sharp-minded economists who know full well that there is no other scheme that’s fit for human consumption. We apologize for wanting to be free!

Glory be to God, people! If what you want is moral and rational, why do you apologize for it? What will it take to get you to stop?

Herewith, a brief story about a recent encounter. It might make you uncomfortable. In fact, I rather hope it will do so, because it’s more important than anything else I’ve written here.

Quite recently I made the acquaintance of a woman I’ll call Jane. Briefly, Jane is in dire straits. She’s a fifty-year-old cancer survivor, the chemotherapy for which has largely ruined her body. She’s penniless, her only income being SSDI. She has a fourteen year old daughter she loves more than her own life. Yet Jane’s parents have contrived to take custody of her daughter from her. Those parents are also exceedingly controlling. They’re determined that Jane and her daughter shall not escape their clutches and have taken measures to thwart all her previous attempts.

Yes, I’ve verified all of that. Jane is a true victim of circumstances and other people. Events have beaten the will completely out of her. She has no idea how to make even a small change in her situation.

You can imagine my reaction at learning all the above. I want very badly to help this woman. “Act with love toward those whom God puts in your path,” Father Schliemann said, and I’ve resolved to do so to the best of my ability. But there’s a problem with that: Jane herself. She’s massively reluctant to prioritize.

It’s clear that Jane must leave her parents’ home. She agrees with that. But she wants to stay close to them, even though they live in a very expensive district that Jane could never afford. Besides, there’s her daughter, who’d have to leave all her friends and the high school she wants to attend. And Jane doesn’t want to live in this place, or that one, or in this other district...

Frustrating, eh? But you haven’t heard the worst part: She kept apologizing to me for all this! If I still had any hair, I’d be tearing it out. Instead, I got tough:

“Damn it all, make some choices! You have to decide what matters most and deal with it,” I said. “That’s how problems are solved. Not by tangling them up into a big ball. Now look at me: Do you want to solve any of your problems or not?”

I was shouting by the end of that. It’s my natural response to such behavior. Most women act offended by it. To her credit, Jane did not. All the same, she kept apologizing for everything, and nothing I could say or do would stop her.

How do you help someone who apologizes for her own existence?

The Enemy loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking "Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?" they will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them to make. As a result, while their minds are buzzing in this vacuum, we have the better chance to slip in and bend them to the action we have decided on. – C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

I’m unsure there’s any point to going on further, either about this subject or at this blog. Nothing changes. No one is listening. The wisdom of greater men than I and greater minds than mine has been ignored, so why should I hope to have a greater effect? It’s foolish, really. Yet I’ve persisted since 1997.

Will you listen to me just this once, Gentle Reader? Stop apologizing. It’s a sign of weakness, a placard that says to your enemies “Attack here.” He who assails you wants your response more than anything else. His assaultive behavior will be reinforced by it. Besides, apologies are meaningless. If you’re wrong, either events have already demonstrated it or they soon will. If you’re right...?

If John Wayne wouldn’t apologize, why should you? Are you less of a man than he was? Are your rights and prerogatives inferior to his – or to mine?

Have a nice Monday, if that’s possible after reading the above.

More pointless intervention.

Yes, I really give a damn about "democracy" in some third-world country.

Well, it becomes more and more obvious by the day that the Borg has decided that Trump is unacceptable--American voters aside. There is now an overt merger of the neocons and the humanitarian interventionists. Call it Barack Obama marries Dick Cheney. That's what is happening. The German Marshall Fund has founded a new project called the Alliance for Securing Democracy . . . .^[1]

Note the involvement of scumbag Bill Kristol in this "Alliance."

Author Harper's piece is short and contains interesting information on a more insightful President Trump than you’re likely to hear about in the media. Soros in the picture in the anti-Trump spasm. Big surprise there. Will no one rid us of this pustule?

Notes
^[1] "Establishment gang up against Trump intensifies." By Harper, Sic Semper Tyrannis, 8/6/17.

Sunday, August 6, 2017

The Most Awful Day: 103rd Anniversary

[The piece below first appeared at Eternity Road on August 6, 2005. I repost it every year on August 6. Long-time Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch will have seen it before. The day, its events, and their genesis are critically important to an understanding of the evils done by governments. They will repeat those evils endlessly down the centuries, unless and until men of good will should finally find a means by which to halt them. -- FWP]

On August 6, the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, it's your Curmudgeon's habit to reflect on the terrible decisions that led to that event, and to ponder whether any of them might have been made differently if their makers had had foreknowledge of the things that we of this time have experienced. He's done so before, and will probably do so again.

But not today.

Quite a number of commentators have characterized August 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay killed Hiroshima and 130,000 of its mostly civilian residents, as the most awful day in the history of the world: the day humanity exhibited both its ability and its willingness to annihilate itself in toto. It was an awful day, to be sure, but not for that reason. As of that day, we did not have the power to destroy ourselves that completely. Nor do we have it yet today, the dire mutterings of darker souls notwithstanding.

It was an awful day because, in the opinion of President Truman and his key advisors, the atomic bombing of a Japanese city was the least bad of the available tactical choices. Every other means by which they might force the Japanese to surrender had a higher total casualty figure attached. One, the amphibious invasion of the Japanese Home Islands by American troops, had been estimated to produce a million American deaths, to say nothing of how many Japanese would have died in the fighting.

There's no way to revisit that crucial moment in history and supply those decision makers with the foreknowledge of the next sixty years. Even if one could, there's no way to know whether it would have made a difference: in the decision they reached, or in the relative quality of the six decades since then. All one can say with certainty is that it was an awful day indeed, one we would certainly have averted if a less awful alternative had presented itself.

But what, then, was the most awful day? If Hiroshima doesn't take the trophy, what human atrocity could?

Opinions will vary, of course. Some will go by casualty figures; others by broader and more inclusive metrics. Some will argue that calamities other than wars ought to be included in our considerations; others will reply that Nature is indifferent to human concerns, and that only Man's inhumanities to Man should qualify for condemnation.

Your Curmudgeon's angle on the matter is, as you might expect, an unusual one.

The Biblical story of Genesis, which your Curmudgeon considers allegorical rather than a literal narration of Creation and the Fall of Man, speaks plainly yet powerfully of the deed of Cain: the archetypal murder propelled by that deadliest of sins, envy. Note that, by the Biblical account, the Fall was an accomplished fact. Man had already been exiled from Eden. Many an analyst would say that Cain's deed was therefore inevitable; once separated from Divine guidance, someone had to be the first to spill human blood. The use of Cain, the allegorical first child of a woman's loins, as the protagonist in the story merely emphasizes the immediacy of the peril in which Man had placed himself by the Fall.

That approach to the event has considerable substance. Once Man had been removed from the realm of the eternal and unchanging, all possible changes, both for good and for evil, impinged upon him. Murder was only the most dramatic.

Shall we look forward in time, then? He who considers the number of deaths to be the most important measure would look to the genocides of the century past, or to the deaths of millions in our mass wars. These were genuinely horrible, doubt it not. But to your Curmudgeon, comparing the heights of mounds of flesh tends to miss the point.

The history of Man's political and moral development records many fits and starts. Some of these are shrouded behind thick veils of time, such that we of 2005 cannot be certain how many persons, or which nations, were affected by them. But we can be reasonably certain about the Enlightenment and the moral revolution it ignited, for it remains with us today. Indeed, as our contest with the savageries of Islam should illustrate, Enlightenment concepts of rights and justice remain the most powerful and critical moral propositions known to our race.

The wars of pre-Enlightenment Europe were as savage as anything of any other time, our own included. Armed men regularly targeted and slew the unarmed when it suited them to do so. What differed was the technology available. To deal death, one had to employ personal skill and exert muscle power, which limited the amount of carnage a single man or a single army could wreak. But there can be little doubt that, had the weapons of now been available to the warriors of then, they would have used them without scruple. The moral level of the time was too low to expect otherwise.

With Enlightenment moral philosophy and the associated political concepts came a great change in warfare: the conviction that the destruction of war ought to be limited solely to those who elected to participate. As those concepts permeated the nations of the West, many of the ancient practices of war -- enslavement, rapine, looting, the slaughter of non-combatants, the use of non-conbatants as cover or "human shields" -- were put under the cloak of the forbidden, to be scorned by decent warriors and punished by them as they were discovered.

The West saw two centuries of steady improvement in the moral constraints on warfare. Battles came to be ever more regular, ever better confined to a designated, delimited field of conflict. Many battles were actually scheduled; meeting places and times were agreed upon beforehand between the contending forces. Statesmen and thinkers looked forward to a time when death itself might be banished from the battlefield, as an obsolete practice irrelevant to true contests of strength and virtue between the governments of civilized lands.

Until one terrible day in August.

A government with evil intentions had sent two million men marching on a mission of conquest. Its liege lord and top military planners were angry at the stubbornness of a minor power, neutral by treaty, that refused those armies free passage through its lands. The conquest-minded state decided on a strategy of intimidation. An aircraft long kept in reserve was sent aloft on a mission of terror, the first since Hume, Smith, and Locke put their stamp on the moral renaissance of the world.

The aircraft was a Zeppelin, designated the "L-Z" by the commanders of the armies of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Its weapons were gravity bombs, thirteen in number. Its target was the Belgian city of Liege, where the Kaiser's troops had met unexpected resistance to their Schlieffen Plan thrust against France. Its harvest was nine civilian lives: the first civilians deliberately killed by authorized military action in the Twentieth Century.

The date was August 6, 1914.

That, to your Curmudgeon's way of thinking, was the most awful day. The day a major Western power, nominally committed to individual rights, the rule of law, and the norms of civilized warfare, threw all of that aside in hope of imposing its will on the government of another land. The day the line between combatants and civilians was erased.

That line has not yet been redrawn. Perhaps it never will be.

No material advantage can compensate for the sacrifice of a principle. An inflexible, inviolable principle is a safeguard against villainy, a shield behind which ordinary man untouched by the irrationalities and passions of others can conduct peaceable lives in whatever degree of comfort they can contrive. But once a principle has been violated, it protects no one. Often the first violator is ultimately saddest of all over its loss.

We stand ninety-one years down the river of time from that most awful day. America, braced by its unmatched military power and technology, has regained its grasp on the principles of civilized warfare, but the forces we face have no interest in the notion. It would be a high irony if, having clambered so painfully from the pit of Hell Mankind excavated with the mass slaughters of the century past, we should once again unlearn all virtue under the tutelage of our Islamic foes. It would be an irony to defeat all others if the lesson should eventuate in their complete effacement from the Earth.

Saturday, August 5, 2017

A Brief But Cleansing Tirade

About two weeks ago, on an application called Nextdoor.com which is intended to help communities knit together, I put out a notice that I was willing to organize a critique group for aspiring writers in the area. I received replies from several interested parties. After I’d received a number of them, I announced the first meeting of the group to be at 4:00 PM today, at my home, and that I would provide coffee, tea, bottled water, and snacks of various kinds.

About half those who had expressed interest said they would attend. Accordingly, I did a lot of cleaning and tidying-up, bought some very nice snacks, and generally made everything ready for the arrival of the other attendees.

A few minutes ago I received the last of the cancellations. Not one of the “interested parties” who said they would attend is coming. Most gave no reason for their cancellation.

“They” say that no good deed goes unpunished. I think I’ve just had a demonstration.

The Respect Gambit Part 3: Remedies

Yesterday’s piece caused longtime reader furball to comment, in part, as follows:

     Fran, you're a little like Victor Davis Hanson. You write really well and describe stuff. But the folks who read you want to know what to do next.
     I know you don't want to be "that guy" who says, "take up arms," or "assemble at your state capitol."
     But this last post of yours goes around and around that idea with such horrendous circumlocutions! Come on.

I’m sure the comparison to VDH was meant to be flattering. Just about anyone else in my position would routinely tug his forelock and issue the expected I-am-not-worthy declaration. I’m not going to do that. For one thing, that ain’t my style. For another, I don’t write in “horrendous circumlocutions.”

In particular, I don’t belabor the obvious.

I’m almost genetically averse to telling people what they “should” do. A great part of my father’s legacy to me was the leave-me-the-hell-alone attitude and mindset that’s served me well these past sixty-five years. He implemented it by responding to exhortations that he “should” do something by:

Buying the other guy a drink,
Looking at his watch (which seldom worked),
And saying “Whoops! I gotta go.”

As I seldom drink in public, I can’t use his approach, so mostly I just ignore people with well meant advice to offer.

I suppose it won’t surprise you to learn that I don’t attend public gatherings and never open my door to a stranger with a sheaf of periodicals in his hand.

Yet here I am, a prolific Web writer and fiction monger, venting all sorts of crankery for general consumption as if I actually knew something others don’t know! Paradoxical? Perhaps. But the Web is a bit like a huge open-air mall. Visitors are welcome to visit any of its establishments, including the many gin mills at which bloviators such as I hold forth interminably on any and every subject under the sun. But no one is compelled to sample my wares. You like ‘em? Great. I serve it up daily, or just about. Thanks for your patronage and feel free to return at your leisure. You don’t? There are a lot of other places to drink, so be on your way, and don’t let them thar swingin’ doors hit you in the ass.

Crude? Perhaps. But I’m straining to avoid circumlocution, horrendous or otherwise.

“If what you’re doing doesn’t work, do something else!” – Michael Emerling

Some of the most penetrating of all wisdoms are “too obvious” for many people. I first encountered the above statement from persuasion expert Michael Emerling on his audio series “The Essence of Political Persuasion,” which I believe is still available from the Advocates for Self-Government. Upon the instant I first heard it, thirty years ago, I remarked “Of course!” internally. Yet I, like so many other persons on the pro-freedom Right, had violated that stricture innumerable times...and I’m sure I’ve violated it many times more since then.

Another penetrating wisdom, which reached me via an old friend, is that people will “marry” their own conclusions far more readily than they will yours. You can argue for your point with all the skill of a Demosthenes. You can marshal innumerable facts in support of your position. You can defend it with irrefutable logic of crystalline brilliance. But if the other guy doesn’t want to accept it, he won’t do so, at times even at great cost to himself.

On the other hand, if you can induce him to make it his conclusion...

Am I being just too “obvious” here?

I have a huge number of things to do today – I’ll be hosting a writers’ circle / critique group this afternoon – and at any rate, I’d rather not beat this point any bloodier than I already have.

I’m not here to tell anyone what to do. I’m a thinker and an analyst. I study what I see, and attempt to trace the causal threads that run through it. I present those threads to my Gentle Readers. The rest is up to them – up to you.

I’m also not a collectivist. I don’t believe in single, “rifle shot” approaches to the remediation of social and political maladies. I prefer to see people experiment with a range of approaches. Over time, success will elevate some and failure will disqualify others. Note how consistent this is with the paragraph above it.

So if you want change to current circumstances:

Think about what you’d like;
Review the approaches to it others have taken;
Apply your reasoning powers and whatever creativity you possess to the subject;
And act.

Don’t wait for others – no, not even for your humble Curmudgeon Emeritus! – to tell you what you “should” do. Choose your own approaches. Compare your results with those others have achieved. Draw any further conclusions your experiences may warrant, then rinse and repeat.

Aren’t there enough people telling you what you “should” do – and aren’t the lot of them wearying at best and utterly vile at worst?

Americans shouldn’t tolerate that sort of thing.

A plausible hypothesis for anti-Russia hysteria.

One of several:

It is a difficult situation for the Russian government. The Russians mistakenly believed that the demise of the Soviet Union made us all friends. It seems only Gorbachev understands that the Soviet collapse removed all constraint on Washington’s hegemonic behavior. Few in Russia seem to understand that the enormous budget and power of the US military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower, warned in 1961, needs an enemy for its justification, and that the Soviet collapse had removed the enemy. The very minute that Russia stood up for its national interest, Washington filled the desperately needed category of “The Enemy” with Putin’s Russia.

That's one theory. I've also seen it argued that some Jewish émigrés from Russia have a particular animus toward Russia. I also think that Russians' coming to the aid of Syria was distressing to the Israeli government which I believe wants civil turmoil in or the dismemberment of Syria and others of its neighbors. Russia is also aligned with Iran which Israel views as its number one threat.

There are no a few who also argue that it's all about gas pipelines and the "monstrous" nature of the Assad "regime." As a commenter elsewhere on the web observed, once your government is referred to a the ____ "regime" you know that international law no longer applies to you.

Readers are welcome to suggest other reasons for our bizarre hostility to Russia. Paul Hill in my post immediately preceding this one touches on the U.S. interventions around the world. Neil Clark has a more comprehensive list. In light of this history it's a bit much to hear the anti-Russia zealots go on about Russian "intervention" and "expansionism."

"Washington Pushes Harder Against Russia." By Paul Craig Roberts, Information Clearing House, 8/1/17.

Ignoring the elephant.

What Russian expansionism? is more like it, though Gen. Jack Keane appears to think the Russians are bent on world domination. Keane is the poster warrior for civilian control of the military. Anyway . . . web commenter Paul Hill has a good point:

It does not puzzle me that anyone should be concerned about a foreign power involving itself in an election. It does however seem that the crows have come home to roost. Chile, Argentina, Panama, Vietnam, Cuba (unsuccessfully),Iraq, Iran...are all places the US didn't mind manipulating governments in their favour. However, I do find it extremely puzzling that Americans are concerned about the influence of Russia when its government is so obviously paid for and managed by Big Money and corporate interests. Hmmm...the freedom to vote for either Coke or Pepsi? Where's the freedom? Seems to me this all a smoke and mirrors to distract everyone from the fact that "Democracy" is weakly gasping for any sign of life --- not with a bang but a whimper.^[1]

Mr. Hill's point about the influence of big money on U.S. politics is on target. It's bizarre then that, instead of addressing this (and vote fraud) and the wholesale foreign bribery that screams for attention with respect to the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons personally, the U.S. press and the political whores on Capitol Hill are obsessed with the deleterious influence of THE RUSSIANS (!!!)

Notes
^[1] Comment by Paul Hill on "Trump’s breathtaking surrender to Russia." By Michael Gerson, Washington Post, 7/20/17.

Friday, August 4, 2017

The Respect Gambit Part 2: Dropping Our Guard

When I wrote this piece, I was primarily concerned with what we might call the mathematics of social metastability. I’ve known for a while that certain deviances must be curbed early, lest their metastatic properties produce social cancers that would threaten the life of the host. However, it’s in the nature of Man that such deviances cannot be utterly eradicated. Their numbers can be held down; that is all. So it’s important for a polity / society / culture to have defenses against their expansion – and of course, against their celebration as something innovative and desirable.

When I wrote this piece – golly gee, it seems like only yesterday! – I sought to address both the heightened aggressiveness of the practitioners of those deviances and the pressure to treat them publicly as above criticism. The causal connection “should” be “obvious” (he said entirely non-ironically), but a great many Americans have yet to detect it, mainly because only lunatics such as your humble Curmudgeon Emeritus are crazy enough to court public opprobrium by mentioning it.

You’re welcome to your own opinion about whether deviances such as aggressive homosexuality, militant misandry, transgenderism, Islam in America, and the open practice of what Charles Murray has labeled “thug culture” can be tolerated, long term or short. But unless these things are curbed, they will continue to expand, for the simplest of all reasons: we dropped our guard against them.

In essence, the promoters and practitioners of those deviances took note of the defenses American society had mounted against them, targeted them, and strove single-mindedly to dismantle them. Once the barriers were down, the deviants could surge forth from their closets to afflict the rest of us without pretense. What I’ve called “the respect gambit” was the lever they contrived to pry open America’s social door.

If we don’t come immediately to grasp the nature of “the respect gambit” and do something to disarm it, American society is doomed. I know that’s a strong statement for 5:10 AM EDT, but the trends I see developing leave me no choice about it. Accordingly, here I am to describe the mechanism we must oppose and how to go about it.

However, this excursion into human social order and what makes it coherent will be more extended than most, so first, a little more coffee.

“Hope has no police, no legislatures, and no man-made laws. Our rule is simplicity itself: ‘An it harm none, do as thou wilt.’” -- Alain Morelon

The Spooner Federation books are a major component of what I hold to be my life’s true work. They explore, in fictional form, both the possibilities of anarchism among persons raised in it and committed to it, and some of the reasons why it’s no more stable than any form of government. I’ve received broadsides against the themes in those books, both from persons utterly committed to anarchism and from persons angry that I should have broached the possibility.

There are a number of sociocultural motifs in the Spooner Federation series that can pass unnoted at first reading. One that almost no one has ever mentioned in correspondence with me is the universality of the bourgeois virtues. Everyone in the stories works at something. Yet some are less willing to work than others; consider Elizabeth Peterson in Which Art In Hope. Some become drunk with power and are enraged when they’re defied; consider Charisse Morelon in Freedom’s Scion. Some aspire to a status they can’t earn by their own efforts; consider Victor in Freedom’s Fury. And of course, there are those whose envy of more successful others leads them to some very bad decisions; consider Alex Dunbarton, again in Freedom’s Fury.

Healthy, sustainable social orders institute barriers against the indulgence of sloth, power lust, greed, and envy. Though some such barriers are secular in nature, the most important one – the one that’s functioned more reliably than all others combined – is the Christian ethos, when coupled to a confident censoriousness toward those who deviate from its strictures.

The Christian ethos can be most succinctly summed up as the practice of the four cardinal virtues:

Prudence,
Justice,
Temperance,
Fortitude.

No one intelligent enough to read the effusions I post here at Liberty’s Torch will need to have those virtues explicated in detail. Their overriding importance in restraining explosions of sloth, power lust, greed, and envy cannot be overstated. Indeed, without them – and without a mated willingness among people generally to criticize to the point of ostracism those who disdain them – no society can endure. And there is this: they can only be sustained by faith: the conviction that they are good and necessary in themselves, requiring no elaborate “proof.”

A healthy social order, in which deviances are kept within tolerable bounds, absolutely requires the cardinal virtues and the hostility of those who practice them toward those who don’t. But we’re not nearly done.

As I wrote here, tolerability is a matter of degree. A deviance that keeps itself to itself while observing the sociocultural norms in public can be tolerated: i.e. it can be permitted to exist in small numbers. However, if it offers its practitioners reinforcements that can exceed their ability to resist, as is the case with many vices, only public disapprobation tantamount to ostracism can keep it curbed. When disapprobation fails to be sufficient, the practice of the vice will expand.

Some deviances have the power to evoke a fad. The current transgenderism fad is a perfect example. For the first time in my memory, we have persons openly proclaiming that the sex of one’s natal body has nothing to do with one’s “gender.” As there are always curious persons, especially among the young, about how it might feel to be the other sex, this has promoted a huge surge of “exploration” that’s already having deleterious social and commercial consequences. Some of those consequences will fall entirely upon the “explorers,” who will soon (if they haven’t already) discover that most employers are unwilling to condone such disruptive nonsense within their enterprises.

Note that transgendered individuals have existed for a long time. The keys to attaining social acceptance were discretion and presentation. Discretion, in that the transgendered person would refrain from openly attacking the sociocultural norms; presentation, in that a man who wants to live and be taken as a woman – by far the majority of the transgendered are biological men who want to live as women – would impose upon himself whatever measures might be demanded of him to be generally accepted as such, from various elaborate personal preparations to relocation. Since those measures are indeed quite demanding, very few persons were strongly enough motivated to accept them.

Clearly, conditions are different today.

Needless to say, the legal order has a part to play in this. Continuing with the example of transgenderism, among the steps required of a transgender to attain the status he seeks is acquiring the necessary documentation for that new status. Recent developments have made this loom very large...but that was not always the case.

Time was, personal legal documentation was practically nonexistent. As recently as 1900, even legal birth certificates were unknown in these United States. Parents would note the birth of a child on the black leaves at the end of the family Bible. Births were otherwise recorded by neighborhood churches, if at all. Once again, conditions are different today.

Think about all the government wastepaper you “need” today:

A birth certificate;
A Social Security card;
If male, a Selective Service registration card;
Depending upon locale, proof of legal residence in these United States;
For drivers, a driver’s license;
For travelers abroad, a passport;
For about 1100 different occupations, an occupational license.

Those are merely the items that come to mind at once. I have no doubt that there are others. To replace all of them, someone who wants to transition must have the cooperation of various levels of government in his efforts – and the willingness of governments to cooperate blasts a large hole in the barriers that once kept transgenderism confined to a tolerable few.

But of course, in a nation as over-governed as ours, those bits of paper are required if one is to exercise a reasonable degree of personal latitude. Imagine what it would take to board a plane without them.

Another important element enters the mix with a change in governmental acceptance. By changing its attitude toward the deviance from outlawry (or non-recognition) to legal toleration, the State, which in our time is all too widely regarded as the ultimate arbiter of everything, has placed itself in implicit opposition to the sociocultural norms. That allows the deviant to represent himself as having been oppressed but now being liberated, with the corollary that private citizens’ disapproval should vanish as well.

Needless to say, this is a complete non sequitur. Many things are and have been legal that others have disapproved to the point of exclusion. Conversely, many things in which private persons see no harm – in moderation, at least – have been outlawed. There is no necessary connection between the legal order and the norms of society. Yet deviants strive to conflate the two at every turn.

In this regard, the most notable deviance is that of homosexuality. About sixty years ago, homosexual conduct was illegal throughout the United States. With the relaxation of the laws against it, homosexual activists were able to grab hold of the “oppression” banner and transmute it into a drive for general social acceptance. The “Gay Pride” phenomenon was born...and once again, allow me to note the absurdity of pride in something the sufferer claims was inborn. (It gets even more absurd when we note homosexuals’ hostility to the word homosexual, and to the availability of therapies that have succeeded in reversing the sexual orientations of some homosexuals.) Over time, waving the “oppression” banner sufficed to neutralize the social disapproval that had previously kept homosexuality within tolerable limits.

A deviance on the march will seldom be satisfied with toleration. The practitioners are aware that toleration can be a veneer over continued disapproval. As most deviances are anxious to expand their numbers – population having an emotional connection, if no other, with perceptions of acceptability – demands for respect are next to be heard. Without popular respect, the barriers to the expansion of the deviance will remain too firm for practitioners’ tastes.

The first and possibly most important venue for mandatory “respect” is the verbal: what you may and must not say. I’ve ranted about this before, but the subject is evergreen. Once again, homosexuality is the best contemporary example. Today it can cost one’s job to express disapproval of homosexuality, much less the opinion that it’s not really inborn at all but rather a conscious choice. That hazard is gradually being extended to several other deviances. Human Resources departments seem eager to comply, with the implication that the increased power to regulate the lives of employees is their real priority.

However, the delegitimization of verbal disapproval has institutional consequences. Consider in this connection the ongoing campaign against the Catholic Church. Several deviances are enlisted in this effort, most notably homosexuals and the promoters of abortion on demand. They cannot abide a large institution, whose allegiants deem it to possess moral authority, that openly condemns the behavior they cherish. Similarly, corporations whose executives are known to be opposed to various deviances are regularly targeted for economic damage, usually through boycotts, in the attempt to get the “offending” executives expunged.

This is a large subject; I don’t pretend to have produced anything but the barest outline of the problem in our place and time. It’s a critical factor in the acceleration and intensification of our social chaos, though it’s not the only one. It deserves to be studied in great depth.

Bear in mind always that there are persons who attach themselves to a “cause” specifically to profit from it. The most visible “spokesmen” for some deviance are likely to be of that sort. Sincerity is not often found in the vicinity of profits to be made by aggravating a conflict. That doesn’t mean they can’t be effective. Indeed, a lack of conviction is often an asset to a demagogue; it allows him to bend with the winds.

One final thought before I close for today: When a deviance bursts the bonds that have traditionally restrained it to a tolerable level, the prior social dynamic is often reversed. Ordinary persons who desire only to live according to their own convictions will find themselves threatened for nonconformance to the “new standard.” The intrusions can be of several kinds, including legal ones.

There are always consequences for not having the courage of one’s convictions. Why else would fortitude be a virtue?

Crimea in U.S. military thinking.

All the financing of Maidan in Ukraine was driven by one particular goal, for which the U.S. State Department spared neither suitcases with dollars, nor cookies from Mrs. Nuland - Crimea. American missile defense system in Crimea would close the entire South and South-West Russia from the possibility of using ballistic missiles that serve as a deterrent to so-called American preventive nuclear strike. No coincidence that the much-touted project of European missile defense, which badly battered the nerves of our politicians and military, has flopped after the restoration of status quo in Crimea.^[1]

I have observed in the past that had the U.S. wanted Russia to relax about events in Ukraine it could have provided assurances that the U.S. had no designs on Crimea. A useful analytical tool applies in spades here, namely, "if you want to understand what is going on, focus on what is NOT being said or done." The U.S. "forgot" to make clear what its intentions were regarding Crimea so we can assume that they were nefarious.

It's beyond obvious that the earlier U.S. concerns about countering the threat of Iranian missile attack were a pretext.

Notes
^[1] "How Russia Ruined American Plans in Crimea." By Viktor Sokirko, Ft. Russ, 3/19/16.

F 16 Cockpit View, Norway.

Time for a sustained counterattack.

Most of the time Pres. Trump seems to be in a reactive mode when the Dems throw a punch or or the cuckservatives leave him twisting in the wind (which is most of the time). Commenter Wind_Racer suggests a way for him to go on the offensive:

The list of Clinton/DNC crimes and suspicious activities continues to grow. What we need is for the President to detail TO THE NATION (in a speech which the MSM will be unable to ignore) some of the Democrat Party's most egregious crimes, and then DETAIL their wholesale destruction of emails, computer data, and electronic equipment - WHEN, WHERE AND BY WHOM.
The crimes and subsequent coverup may not hold up in court, but if instead of broad claims, Trump can give Americans facts that they can hold onto - facts they can discuss over dinner - details to use in arguments with Democrats, then those crimes could significantly erode public support for this most corrupt party. It will also help him fend off coming attacks by Comey/Mueller/Rose[n]stein by demonstrating that they are not interested in real crimes.^[1]

It's hardly rocket science. But where is the White House push back? Where is Bannon? Don't they have a Top Ten Transgressions list by now?

Dems and their lickspittle pals in the press are indeed not interested in real crimes. They are certainly not interested in the Clintons' WalMart/Amazon/Coke/Pepsi-sized pay-to-play arrangements with Goldman-Sachs and every foreign government on the planet west of Freedonia. No! It's the utterly bogus claim of Trump's "collusion" with the Russians that absorbs their attention. No one from the Post Office tried to trash Sharyl Attkisson's computer and when did the IRS abuse anyone?

For a classic example of how far the media will go to jam 40 lbs. of "collusion" flapdoodle into the proverbial 30-lb. blivet you can't beat this Washington Post headline:

Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria,
a move sought by Moscow.^[2]

Yes, that's right. Moscow also wants something that common sense and decency require so Trump is fatally compromised for wanting the same thing. He sold us out!

As Scott Ritter writes, "Thousands of fighters serving under the banner of Al Qaeda and ISIS were, in fact, armed and trained by the CIA."^[3] Just let that sink in for a moment. We have been supporting the guys who burned a captured Jordanian pilot alive in a cage and roasted three other guys suspended face down over a gasoline fire. Obama didn't even break sweat. Support the moderate scum!

This support for two-legged beasts should never have gotten started in the first place and the need for its termination is self evident, but the Washington Post's Greg Jaffe and Adam Entous spin this as Trump's being Vladimir Putin's butt boy. No agenda here. When Putin says "jump" Trump says "how high." That's the story. Never mind the emails and the Pakistani IT guys. Whom else could Debbie Wasperherman-Shoots hire but some sketchy foreigners? Americans do this sort of thing -- entrust the crown jewels to foreigners.

As the authors of that Washington Post article write, "even its backers have questioned its [the CIA’s covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels'] efficacy since Russia deployed forces in Syria two years later." That is to say, its backers (the CIA and the U.S. government) question its efficacy after the Russians were invited in by the country we were attacking but not that attack's morality, constitutionality, or compliance with international law before the Russians arrived. No, that's off the table like Hillary's obstruction of justice and corrupt dealings, as well as a boatload of other Dem activities that warrant focused attention in a rough draft of a grand jury true bill.

There is nothing normal about an American president’s subservience to Russia’s interests and worldview. It is not the result of some bold, secret, Nixonian foreign policy stratagem — the most laughable possible explanation. Does it come from Trump’s bad case of authoritarianism envy? A fundamental sympathy with European right-wing, anti-democratic populism? An exposure to pressure from his checkered financial history? There are no benign explanations, and the worst ones seem the most plausible.^[4]

Actually, there is a benign explanation: it's in America's interest to stop killing people because neocons and the MIC think it's a good idea. But to Mr. Gerson, the author of the above quote, Trump's subservience is just a given. A determination to stop an unconstitutional, aggressive war against Syria just cannot be discussed. Only absurd ipse dixit claims of subservience, authoritarianism, and sympathy with Europe's "right wing" can. Yes, Trump's clearly a populist and the essence of populism -- as we know -- is hostility to democracy. Clearly, Gerson confuses ultra-leftists with populists. As we say on the internet, you can't make this stuff up. Unless, that is, you contribute to Jeff Bezos's personal blog.

A great last word from a commenter on Gerson's article:

There is no way this fool of an author did one bit of research to determine what the program actually involved and what a colossal failure it was.
"The CIA had appropriated around $500 million for this effort, the agency had been able to find only about 60 Syrian fighters deemed “moderate” enough to train and arm. Of these 60, the CIA was able to account for only five at the end of the effort, the rest having melded into various murderous militias—including ISIS—slaughtering each other in Syria. That discovery marked the effective end of the failed program."
So Obama's fake effort of doing anything is stopped since $500 Million for 5 guys is deemed stupid is a surrender to Russia according to WaPoo?
Fake News!^[5]

Notes
^[1] Comment by Wind_Racer on "'Collusion' Collapses: Dem Congressional Espionage Ring Takes Center Ring." By Clarice Feldman, American Thinker, 7/30/17.
^[2] "Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow." By Greg Jaffe and Adam Entous, Washington Post, 7/19/17.
^[3] " Say Goodbye to Regime Change in Syria. Trump's decision to stop sending arms to rebels alters everything." By Scott Ritter, Information Clearing House, 7/26/17.
^[4] "Trump’s breathtaking surrender to Russia." By Michael Gerson, Washington Post, 7/20/17.
^[5] Comment by TomGenin at id.

Thursday, August 3, 2017

What You May And May Not Say: The "Respect" Gambit

According to some folks, anyway:

So let me drop the sarcasm and explain it in terms you might understand better. Respecting women isn't a left or right issue....
But look at this issue from the perspective of a parent instead of an ideologue. I have two daughters. I want them to be healthy and fit and happy. I want them to eat well and treat their bodies with respect. But what if one or both of them struggle with their weight? Will berating them and shaming them for their body shape or size get me the result that I want? Or will it damage them and make the problem worse?

Megan Fox – no, not that Megan Fox – strains to square the circle by contending that men “have a right” to their preferences in female appearance, but that to talk about those preferences is verboten as it “disrespects” women. This is the totalitarian’s version of freedom:

You can have your own opinions,
But don’t you dare express them.

That was enough to get my boilers lit at 5:43 AM EDT.

Let’s talk about this seemingly omnipresent notion of mandatory “respect.” We’re told we have to “respect” damned near everything these days. Don’t want black thugs playing pain-threshold “music” outside your apartment windows at 1:30 AM? You’re a bad person for not “respecting” their culture (which is designed to offend you). Don’t want drag queens disturbing traffic with public parades for “gay pride?” You’re a bad person for not “respecting” their sexual orientation (which they all claim is inborn). Don’t want Muslims blocking the streets with twice-daily public “prayer” gatherings? You’re a bad person for not “respecting” their faith (which holds that you must be converted, enslaved, or killed). Don’t want your little girl to share a rest room with a bearded, pinafore-wearing degenerate with liquor on his breath? You’re a bad person for not “respecting” his choice of gender identity (which he chose to allow him unsupervised proximity to your little girl).

Let’s halt right there and ask a stupid question:

What is respect?

Here are the definitions from the 1913 Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary:

To take notice of; to regard with special attention; to regard as worthy of special consideration; hence, to care for; to heed.
To consider worthy of esteem; to regard with honor.
To look toward; to front upon or toward.
To regard; to consider; to deem.
To have regard to; to have reference to; to relate to; as, the treaty particularly respects our commerce.

Feel free to choose among them. None of them says to me that thou mayest not criticize nor oppose. And quite frankly, when it comes to the abominations I listed above, my preferred form of criticism is with my Remington 870 Express 20-gauge shotgun.

But really, the root of the malady lies in the loss of what it once meant to be deemed respectable.

Time was, a man was considered respectable if he met the social criteria of his place and time. In Anglo-American societies, it meant that his word was good; that he honored his debts and contrived to discharge them without public assistance; and – here’s the Ace kicker, so pay attention – that he was known to conform to the norms of deportment his society deemed proper, especially in public.

To be sure, there were some “gotchas!” in there. For example, a man of Victorian England would not be considered “respectable” if he were caught patronizing prostitutes. One who was caught at it was expected to exhibit contrition and perform penance to his wife (if he had one). It would take such a man quite a while to regain “respectability.” He might need to relocate, perhaps even change his name.

Thus, a necessary condition for respectability in Victorian England was not to be known as one who patronized prostitutes. However, historical data suggest quite strongly that the prostitutes of Victorian London received customers at the rate of approximately 2,000,000 per week. Thus, the essence of the requirement wasn’t to avoid prostitutes; it was not to get caught with one.

There’s a powerful message in there, one that it takes more than a single swift glance to discern.

Respectability was about the maintenance of public order. Public order, of course, is a matter of rules about what one must, may, and must not do. Typically, some of those rules had the force of law behind them: blue laws and noise-curfew laws, for example. Some were “enforced” solely by social mechanisms, which could range from opprobrium to coffee and pistols at dawn. What mattered above all else was the maintenance of the order: the standard of behavior expected of every member of society.

Consider especially this: Even a man generally thought “not respectable” was expected to impress the rules and the desirability of being respectable upon his children, particularly his sons. Ponder that along with the “don’t get caught” codicil to patronizing prostitutes.

In our place and time – for those new to Liberty’s Torch, that’s Twenty-First Century America – the absurd notion of obligatory “respect” for any and every deviation from what the great majority of us prefer and expect has been used to destroy public order. It is no longer possible, in the strict sense, to have a public order when any miscreant is licensed to do whatever he damned well pleases no matter whom it injures, disturbs, or offends.

What we have under a regime of mandatory “respect” for everything is public chaos, including a terrible diminution of safety, especially the safety of the more vulnerable. The matter is exacerbated by the loss of the social mechanism that was once critical to maintaining order: discrimination.

Merchants cannot refuse to sell to anyone;
Employers cannot refuse to hire anyone for various reasons;
Property owners cannot refuse to sell or rent to anyone for the same reasons.

Those aspects of discrimination were the teeth behind the public order or earlier times: completely nonviolent exclusions from the webs of intercourse that make life tolerable for those not excluded.

You may think I’ve wandered rather far afield from Megan Fox’s notions about “respecting” women. Actually, that’s been on my mind throughout this tirade. A “respectable” woman should logically be expected to show respect for the sensibilities of the rest of us. That a fair proportion of women do not, and thereafter compound their crimes by shrieking about how we should respect them, is one of the principal drivers of social disharmony in our time, particularly relations between the sexes.

So, to women who want “respect:”

Get your weight down.

Get it down at least to the point where you don’t look as if you’ve swallowed a fully inflated beach ball. Get medical supervision if you need it. Use corsets or waist trainers – moderately and judiciously; there’s no good to be had in tightening down to the point of asphyxiation – to assist in finding your actual, God-given waist and, after you’ve found it, maintaining it. If you do these things with resolve and perseverance – in other words, if you show respect, not merely for esthetic principles but for your own body — you’ll be respected. You might not appear in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, but then, the swimsuits being vended today aren’t terribly flattering anyway.

And don’t expect me to be bashful about glaring or snickering should you choose to disregard the above. I’m much harder to embarrass than that. (Rodney Dangerfield and I are tight.)

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

On Knowing What You Are

Quite some time ago, back at the late, lamented Eternity Road, I wrote a piece about the difference between what you are and who you are, and the importance of distinguishing accurately between the two. What you are is your nature; who you are is your individuality. The former is not truly malleable, while the latter is almost entirely a matter of free choice.

Quite a bit of contemporary Sturm und Drang arises from the desire of some among us – unfortunately, a rather strident some – to invert those two categories. They want to believe that they can reshape their natures, and to compel the rest of us to agree that they’ve done so. Conversely, they treat much of their individuation as immutable – often using bits of it as a claim upon others.

It occurred to me just a few minutes ago that a political party has the same dichotomy to deal with. Baldilocks’ recent article about the Democrats drew it into high relief:

     The Democrat Party’s latest strategy sits poorly with some of its loyal backers.
     The Democratic party is facing a revolt from the left after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman said the party would back pro-life candidates in 2018.
     The DCCC chairman, Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, told The Hill that there will not be “a litmus test” for candidates on the subject of abortion. Lujan’s comments come as Democrats attempt to rebuild a broken party that has hemorrhaged elected offices on both the state and national level....

     Saying that the Democrat Party had taken the lead on abortion advocacy is a Captain Obvious assertion, but individual Democrats are far less homogenous in their opinions and beliefs about abortion. And now, after a long record of losing elections, with the 2016 election being the straw, the Party wants to win again.
     And such is the nature of politicians and political parties regardless of affiliation: say what you need to say — even repudiate your most revered sacrament – then, when you win, drop the mask.

Juliette’s cynicism about politicians is a good match for my own. But more to my current point, what we’re seeing here is a test not for individuals but for the Democrat Party. It consists of a single issue – abortion – and whether the Party will enforce consistency about that issue upon its elected officials. For what Juliette has said above is quite correct: to the political creature, what matters is gaining and holding power; what he says or does to do so is merely a matter of choosing the most effective tactics.

Everything we’ve seen from elected Democrats since Roe v. Wade suggests that trusting a Democrat to be sincerely pro-life is an act of utter naivety. But then, we’ve had a slew of indications that Republican politicians are no more reliable in their campaign promises, haven’t we?

It’s becoming ever more imperative that Americans who continue to believe in the nation’s political arrangements reflect, objectively and dispassionately, on how well those arrangements have served us – and on how well they’ve served the true agendas of those in power.

Kurt Schlichter has recently penned two columns:

...which describe how the sort of coup against the Trump Administration some on the Left have been calling for might really eventuate. The outcome is anything but rosy: it entails the destruction of what remains of Constitutional protections for freedom of expression. Yet as Schlichter makes plain, that’s exactly what the plotters intended; they merely wanted to be the ones to decree what may and must not be said.

At this time, the Left is striving by various methods to extinguish the expression of what we might call traditional American sentiments. As the Democrats don’t hold the preponderance of political power, it’s an effort that’s almost entirely in the hands of private forces. Of these, the “Antifa / Black Bloc” thugs are the most notorious. But we must not overlook other players, nominally apart from political maneuverings, who have taken a hand in the proceedings. The machinations of Leftists at Facebook and Twitter are already well known. Just today another such player has shown its cards:

YouTube is, of course, a wholly owned subsidiary of Google. Just recently, YouTube / Google struck the accounts of wildly popular conservative / traditionalist lecturer Jordan B. Peterson, even to the extent of removing his access to his Gmail account. Massive protests forced Professor Peterson’s accounts to be restored...but had he been less popular and less widely admired for his forthright defenses of traditional arrangements, would the outcome have been different?

Apparently, corporations of immense importance to contemporary self-expression have been deciding that what they are isn’t profit-seeking institutions after all, but rather organs of the Left. They’ve enlisted in the Left’s drive to construct a totalitarian State in which only the sentiments the “social justice warriors” approve shall be expressed. If they are certain enough to act thus, isn’t it a decision the rest of us should acknowledge – and act upon?

As above, so below, say the mystics, and indeed it is so. All things that God has not “fixed in the everlasting congruity of things” (Sir Thomas Carlyle) ultimately reduce to individual decisions and the actions that proceed from them. And so we see, beneath all the newsworthy developments, the phenomenon of individuals deciding that their political allegiances are more important than lifelong friendships with those who hold other views.

We don’t talk about this much, possibly because it’s so very sad. After all, the point of a Constitutional system such as ours is to make it possible to relegate matters of public policy to a “safe space” of their own: one in which disagreement on such matters can be tolerated. Plainly, a substantial number of persons within our borders – I refuse to call such persons “citizens,” or more offensive yet, “Americans” – have decided that the Constitutional order doesn’t suit them, specifically because power has escaped their hands. The election of Donald Trump has proved more than their never-terribly-well-concealed totalitarian impulses can take.

A military coup of the sort Kurt Schlichter describes is currently unlikely; the correlation of forces is too plainly against the Left. But the operative word in that sentence is currently. Remember the Obama Administration’s efforts to purge the command ranks of the “politically unreliable.” Dozens of generals and admirals were removed from their posts for no other reason. The Obamunists’ enforcement of absurd “diversity initiatives” – essentially, rights to serve in the military that supersede what had previously been considered disqualifying characteristics – was another stroke to that effect, though apparently of less impact.

Nothing is absolutely reliable except the laws of Nature...and we mustn’t be too confident that we know them to the last button, either.

Know what and who you are. Don’t confuse the two. In particular, know your dealbreakers, especially as they determine with whom you’re willing to have converse, personal, commercial, or otherwise. Sauce for the goose and all that.

Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Have You Ever Felt Like This?

I have:

And believe me, if you haven’t yet, you will. Probably soon.

(Applause to Never Yet Melted.)

No there there.

. . . much to the consterpation of the Dems:

4. If incontrovertible evidence of Russian meddling arose in 2016, why did the federal agencies under the Obama administration (Department of Justice, F.B.I., etc.) do nothing? While we can cook up various theories, the common-sense conclusion is 1. no federal laws were broken and/or 2) there was insufficient evidence that would stand up in court.

"6 Key Questions About RussiaGate." By Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds, Zero Hedge, 8/1/17.