The Death Cults Advance

     The subject of death cultism, and the associated worship of death and its instruments, has been much on my mind lately. Time was, I produced a series of essays about it. No, they weren’t about Satanic rituals conducted by mental defectives, but about persons superficially indistinguishable from you and me, among whom death is treated as something sacramental...something to be sought or inflicted.

     Does anyone remember Terri Schindler-Schiavo? How about Amy Richards? More recently, we had this blatant admission by Mary Williams. And just this morning, the indispensable Sarah Hoyt points us to this...phenomenon:

     A Catholic nursing home in Belgium is reported to have fallen foul of the country's courts after refusing to permit a resident to access euthanasia.

     The incident happened in 2011 when Huize Sint-Augustinus home in Diest refused to allow an elderly woman's doctor access to see her – when it was thought she was about to be given a lethal injection.

     The home has been ordered to pay €6,000 (approx $6,600 or £5,000) in damaged to the family of the woman.

     The civil court in Louvain ruled that "the nursing home did not have the right to refuse euthanasia on the grounds of conscientious objection."

     In this case, the 74-year-old who had terminal cancer received the injection in her own house, rather than in the nursing home.

     The seal has been set on the Sacrament of Death:

• You may kill your unborn child, for any reason or none.
• If you run a “public accommodation” – i.e., any business of any sort anywhere – you must subsidize your employee’s choice to kill her unborn child.
• “Health care providers” may sentence you to death de facto, by refusing you “non-beneficial treatment.”
• As we can see from the article cited above, you can impose your desire to kill yourself even on those who disagree with you.
• And present trends continuing, you might soon be offered death simply because you’re “in the way” – and not be permitted to refuse the gift.

     And a goodly portion of the American electorate is cheering all these developments.

---

     I know that among my Gentle Readers are many who don’t believe in God. For such persons, the following will seem a non-statement:

Human life is sacred.

     It is given to us by forces utterly beyond our control. We cannot replicate those processes, nor can we forever thwart the processes that will eventually take our lives from us. If anything in human experience stands qualitatively above all the rest of the observable universe, it is human life: the tripartite entity comprising a flexible, adaptable body, a rational mind, and a morally aware soul.

     I consider the irreproducibility of human life by artifice to be one of the best evidences that we are more than we appear – that beyond the universe our senses perceive lies a higher and grander realm, ruled by a Maker to Whom we owe everything we are, that our souls are made in His image, and that they will survive the deaths of our bodies.

     How dare anyone destroy so precious a gift? How dare anyone assert a right to do so? How dare anyone compel dissenting others to collaborate with him in so vile an act?

     That subterranean chuckling you’re hearing that seems to echo from the walls of the universe? It comes from the being behind all the death cultists’ cults. You might say it was their founder.

---

     I know religious beliefs are personal things. An old friend with whom I was conversing on a related subject once made an interesting statement about religions. He said that all religions are individual – that no two persons who’ve ever lived agreed on every aspect of their faiths, no matter what label they might have shared. As regards parents’ attempts to instill their faiths in their children, he said that no matter how a parent might strive, his child’s faith would not be sincere until he’d made it his own – that until the child introduced some difference to it, he’d merely be “borrowing” his parent’s creed.

     Stipulate for the sake of argument that whatever labels we might apply to our faiths and ourselves, nevertheless each of us follows a personal religion with which no one else can totally concur. Is there no single tenet that all can accept? Can’t we all agree that human life is sacred, something beyond our ability to replicate that should be exempt from our penchant for unbounded interference?

     The State, of course, will always differ. Ask that Belgian nursing home.

---

     Euthanasia, also known as assisted suicide, is legal in Belgium. Therefore, the Belgian authorities cannot prosecute Smith for having helped Jones to kill himself, as long as he can establish that Jones was willing to die and wanted Smith’s assistance. But the idea that an institution run by the Catholic Church, which today stands essentially alone against the death cults, should be forced to collaborate in an assisted suicide is something wholly different. It contradicts every notion of “freedom of conscience” to which the states of Europe supposedly assent.

     Europe was once called Christendom. Plainly, Christendom is no more.

     The writing’s been on the wall for several decades. The progress of the death cults in establishing hegemony over those of us who revere life has been more rapid than I expected. To these old eyes it appears that the game is down to the short strokes – that the assertion of limitless State authority over life and death at both ends of the process is nearly upon us.

     May God forgive us for not resisting the death cults while there was still time to do so.

Death Cults Redux

     Isn’t there anyone who still believes in the intrinsic value of human life?

     That charnel house known as the Netherlands seems to be not content over killing off their citizens one by one, and have now begun to double-down, with couples killing themselves together in “beautiful” ceremonies so that neither one will be alone (until they’re dead, of course).

     “An elderly couple died holding hands surrounded by loved ones in a rare double euthanasia.

     “Nic and Trees Elderhorst, both 91, died in their hometown of Didam, in the Netherlands, after 65 years of marriage.

     Read it all, if you have the stomach for it.

     Holland was once a beautiful, eminently civilized country. That was before it embraced death as a sacrament. Perhaps we should ask Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh for their memories of that time. Oops, sorry, for a moment I forgot about what happened to them.

     But we’re still above all that, aren’t we?

---

     There are days I find it all but impossible to go on with this enterprise. The madness just keeps accelerating. The several Death Cults that have planted themselves on our shores are merely the most dramatic excrescences of what appears to be a pandemic global psychopathy. I’ve spaced my direct references to them widely to keep from being overwhelmed by the subject. But the tactic no longer helps much.

     We are surrounded by death worshippers. (No, I don’t just mean Muslims.) It’s likely that some of them are your neighbors. I know for a fact that some of them are mine.

     In discussing international relations and conflict studies, we often speak of “salami tactics.” The would-be aggressor looks for flabbiness of will among potential victims. When he finds one, he acts – but if he’s smart, he doesn’t immediately go “whole hog.” He tests his thesis by reaching for a “slice” of what he covets. “No war over the Rhineland.” “Would you risk a continental conflagration over Leipzig?” “So there are a few nuclear weapons in Cuba, what’s the big deal?” And of course most recently: “Let Putin have the Crimea; it’s historically Russian anyway.” If the victim acquiesces, the aggressor is emboldened to reach for another “slice,” and yet another, and another...

     Salami tactics are also employed domestically, according to the agenda of the aggressor. Have a look at the following list:

• Abortion without restrictions.
• Assisted suicide.
• Commonplace ritual mutilations of the human body.
• Involuntary euthanasia of those deemed untreatable or having "no quality of life."
• Legal infanticide within the first X days post-birth.
• Compulsory surrender of the organs of the deceased for transplantation.
• Environmentalist crusades that prioritize human life below other considerations.
• Use of “abandoned” embryos for “research.”
• Creation of zygotes and embryos for non-procreative purposes.
• Government-enforced "triage" to “conserve medical and financial resources.”
• Compulsory acceptance of specified therapies.
• Procreation licenses (alternately, compulsory sterilization of those deemed “unfit”).
• Government eugenics programs:
  • At first, as subsidies to couples with favored genetic characteristics;
  • Later, as compulsory donations of gametes for use in government-supervised breeding programs.
• Conscription for military purposes.
• Conscription for non-military purposes.

     You’ve seen versions of that list before. It just keeps growing as the Death Cultists discover ever more ways to advance their creed. Parts of it have been upon us for some time. Other parts are the targets of our domestic salami slicers.

     Life, and our grip on it, are under attack. They’ve been weakened bit by bit for several decades. Our grandparents and great-grandparents – they who fought, bled, and died in terrible wars for the lives of others – would hardly recognize their posterity.

     The value we place on human life is what gives value to everything else in our world. It’s what allows us to make sense of things, to settle on what we want, and to reason out how to go about getting it. Is it really necessary to be explicit about the implications for its loss?

     Mankind as a species is slowly but steadily going mad.

---

     One organization, alone among all the voices of the world, is unbending in its proclamation that human life is sacred: the Catholic Church. Note how viciously it’s attacked, principally for its opposition to abortion and euthanasia. Note how, whenever someone dares to raise an objection to some element of the Death Cults’ program, some interlocutor will cast a wary eye at him and say “You’re not a Catholic...are you?” in that unmistakable tone that implies that no modern, well-intentioned soul could possibly associate with so retrograde an institution.

     While I differ with some of my Church’s doctrines, nevertheless I will defend it against all comers. Conspicuous among my reasons is this: It’s made all the right enemies. It’s achieved that by defending human life, by placing it above all utilitarian considerations, and by insisting that so precious a gift cannot be disparaged, much less renounced, without eternal consequences.

     Note that Catholicism has essentially disappeared from Europe. So too have most other forms of Christianity, but those have always been satellites to the Church and the Gospels it was formed to conserve and promulgate. When anyone speaks of “the Church,” there’s no doubt about which institution he has in mind. The other denominations have retained a slowly failing fingernail hold on what was once called Christendom by giving ground, on one issue after another, to the Death Cultists. The Church has not.

     Draw the moral.

---

     Wednesdays are currently significant here at the Fortress of Crankitude. Our Newfoundland Rufus has a regular weekly appointment at a veterinary clinic where he receives chemotherapy for B-cell lymphoma. Getting Rufus to the clinic is a burden on us. The treatments are very expensive, and there’s no way to know for how much longer he’ll be receiving them. The point, of course, is to keep Rufus alive and healthy for as long as we can.

     We do it out of love for our dog. We’re not alone; the clinic is just about always busy. People bring pets of all varieties, suffering from many diverse maladies, to be healed, or at least made more comfortable. I have no doubt that the burdens on them are fully comparable to ours.

     How much more precious is the life of a human being? How much more deserving of reverent defense?

     That’s all for today, Gentle Reader. I need to pray.

The Convergence Is Complete

     [The recent explosion of the Planned Parenthood scandal has moved me to post the following piece, which first appeared at Eternity Road on March 18, 2005 -- FWP]

---

     Here are the facts, as your Curmudgeon has them:

     In 1990, Teresa Schindler-Schiavo's heart ceased to beat for several minutes. The resulting hypoxia caused severe brain damage, which left her helpless, unable to care for or feed herself. Doctors recently appointed by Florida courts have called her condition a "persistent vegetative state."

     However, according to several witnesses, Terri still responds to various stimuli. She can't speak, and may not recognize specific persons or elements in her surroundings, but her sensorium is not yet wholly disconnected from her brain. Nor does her brain appear to have lost all its non-autonomic functions.

     Michael Schiavo, Terri's husband, has petitioned to have Terri's feeding tube removed -- in effect, to starve his wife to death -- on the representation that she would have wanted it that way. He contends that she clearly expressed that desire to him, though no written records of such a desire exist. That is, there is no "living will" for Terri Schindler-Schiavo.

     After protracted hearings and appellate decisions, the Florida courts have granted Michael Schiavo's request that Terri's feeding tube be removed. Unless federal authorities step in to prevent it, this will bring about Terri's death by starvation, a process that could take up to two weeks.

     Several Congressmen are attempting to use Congress's subpoena power to delay the inception of this process of execution. Whether the Florida principals and the courts that have backed them will yield to superior federal authority remains to be seen.

     For some years, Michael Schiavo has been living with another woman, who has borne him two children. He and Terri are spouses only in the eyes of the State. Yet he has refused to allow divorce proceedings that would transfer guardianship of Terri to her parents.

     Michael Schiavo also stands to benefit monetarily from Terri's death. The amount is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. A philanthropist, sensing that this might be the true reason Michael wants Terri to die, has offered to buy her life for $1 million -- that is, to pay Michael Schiavo $1 million if he will only relinquish guardianship of his helpless wife. The offer was refused.

     The Florida courts that granted Michael Schiavo's petition to starve his wife to death made a finding of fact, based solely on Michael's representations that Terri would have asked to die in these circumstances. Several persons who knew Terri testified that this was not the case, but to no avail.

---

     Never before in the history of the United States has a man been sentenced to be slowly tortured to death.

     Let's be perfectly candid about what Michael Schiavo intends for his helpless wife: he wants her dead. His claim that she would want the same is hopelessly tainted by his pecuniary interest in her demise. He insists on killing her even though the sole legal way to get her into her coffin is to subject her to two weeks of excruciating torment.

     Were a condemned serial killer to be sentenced to the same ordeal, every civil-rights and humanist group in the country would be up in arms. Nay, it would arouse every such group in the world. Such groups cannot abide the death penalty even for men convicted of the most heinous crimes. The United States would be castigated in every organ known to Man for its callousness, its brutality, and its lack of respect for human life.

     Strangely, those groups have been quite silent about the plight of Terri Schindler-Schiavo. A few have even trumpeted the "right to die" mantra, as if they possessed telepathic time-travel powers that allow them to read Terri's desires retroactively from this point in time.

     Your Curmudgeon will note in passing that the overwhelming majority of those groups also proclaim a "woman's right to choose" -- to choose to kill a helpless, fully developed infant whose head has already entered the birth canal and who is on his way to beginning the adventure of life. Some also condemned Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, preferring to let dictators who had murdered uncounted thousands of helpless persons remain in power rather than allow American soldiers to liberate their subjects by force of arms.

---

     As the years roll past, your Curmudgeon becomes ever more powerfully struck by the prescient insight of the great Clive Staples Lewis.

     In his novel That Hideous Strength, Lewis paints a nightmare landscape of a fictional Britain that's fallen wholly to the mercies of the worst men in the world. Men who desire to torture and destroy as ends in themselves, but who have become skilled at representing their atrocities as "experimentation" or "remedial treatment." Men who lust for power over others as no other men have ever lusted, and who would raise a dead sorcerer from the grave to get it, but who would never admit that their "scientific outlook" could be conjoined with belief in a demon-conjuring wizard. Men whose loyalties have been so completely perverted that they've relocated entirely away from the human race, and away from life itself.

     As the novel's villains struggle to bring the reanimated Merlin into their fold, we are shown that a process centuries long is nearing completion. The process began with the displacement of reverence for innocent life by an ethic that deemed all things, and all lives, to be clay in the hands of human potters, to be shaped according to their untrammeled desires. It took time to evolve, because even those who most strongly advocated it had to shake off the restraints of tradition and upbringing; as Lewis puts it, their inherited morality stood firm against their intellectual rationalizations for the evil they'd sought to legitimize. But once their successors had cast off the fetters of tradition and lingering social disapproval, nothing stood in their way.

     The moment had come for Hell's final advance against Man. The convergence of two mighty engines of death -- the reduction of a life to a mere bag of chemicals judged entirely by instrumental criteria, and the worship of power without regard for its source, its aims, or its uses -- could begin.

---

     Over the millennia, men have killed one another in uncounted millions. It's not new, or particularly noteworthy, that one man should want to kill another -- not even that a husband should want to kill his wife, whom he's sworn before God and man to protect. What is new is the accelerating approval and support for such a desire among the "intellectual elite," including judges appointed to do justice, defend the innocent, and protect the helpless.

     Europe is deeply mired in this trend. The Netherlands is the standard-bearer for "assisted suicide," and for the deliberate execution, with medical concurrence, of inconvenient babies and oldsters. The horror stories are legion -- so many, in fact, that the horror of them has begun to create calluses over our emotions. One can only hear about so many such villainies before stopping one's ears.

     Europe is also the rallying point for the condemnation of the death penalty. The lives of men who've maliciously and unjustifiably destroyed the lives of others are therefore valued more highly than the lives of the helpless and utterly innocent.

     America has been a bastion against this sort of viciousness...until now. European thinking -- utilitarian valuation of the "quality of life" of helpless persons by third parties -- has reached these shores and formed a beachhead. The abortion wars, as serious as they've been, were only a preliminary, a shelling of our moral defenses to soften them for a decisive breakthrough.

     The Terri Schindler-Schiavo case will be that breakthrough, if Michael Schiavo gets his way.

---

     Some have protested that Michael Schiavo must be sincere, since he was willing to turn down a million dollars for his wife's life. This does not follow. Once he'd made his representation that Terri would have wanted to die, Michael could not possibly back away from it in the face of a monetary inducement; that would have constituted an admission that he wants her dead specifically so that he could grab her money, and that he was ready to yield in the face of a better offer. Similarly, he has to resist all attempts to divorce him from Terri, and the Schindlers' impassioned pleas for a transfer of guardianship. To concede guardianship to anyone determined to keep Terri alive would implicitly admit that it was no wish of Terri's that mattered, but rather that he wants her dead for his own convenience. Either admission would indict and convict him of conspiracy to commit murder through a judicial process.

     Terri Schindler-Schiavo's life matters to her husband-in-name in precisely one way: it's a barrier to something he wants. His willingness to sacrifice her is a declaration that in service to his ends, even the murder of the helpless woman whose well-being lies in his care is an acceptable means. It's a pledge of allegiance to the death cults.

---

     This sickening story has a few scenes yet to run. Whether Terri Schindler-Schiavo will survive it is known only to God. But anyone willing to open his eyes can easily see that elements of opinion and organs of government here in the United States are aligning with the death cults.

     Florida courts have ratified Michael Schiavo's desire to kill his helpless, innocent wife.

     Groups that claim to hold life as sacred, that protest in droves at every execution, and that condemn the use of American military power regardless of the justifications or the delicacy of its application, are standing aside, content to watch as Terri is tortured to death.

     Low creatures such as Peter Singer, so-called "ethical philosopher," have argued that creatures such as Terri have no right to life that others are bound to respect.

     And as in Lewis's That Hideous Strength, the legions of Hell look on in delicious anticipation.

     Pray.

Chronicles Of The Death Cults 2025-08-28

     It’s been a while since I last touched on this subject. However, the processes in motion have remained in motion. They won’t stop politely to allow us to catch our breath. To misquote Robert A. Heinlein, since they don’t take long lunch breaks, neither should we.

     My dear friend and frequent commenter Pascal, in referring to yesterday’s emission, sent this:

     That Mayah was immediately arrested for brandishing a weapon is the most important lesson to be driven into thick, sheepish human skulls of the subjects of that decadent realm. The most influential seats of UK law-makers are occupied by even more deadly death cultists than the Islamists they continue to import and protect. These rulers are so passively evil and cowardly they don't bother bloodying their own hands. Instead they simply continue to write laws that are not only quick to condemn those who defend themselves or the vulnerable, but consistently remove all obstacles to, and any fear of facing justice by, active psychopaths.
     When the justice system is officially turned on its head in this manner, how much more proof is needed that the country's law makers are even more evil than the common criminal?

     This is an indirect swipe at a phenomenon that was once commented on by someone whose name I’ve forgotten. The essence of it was as follows:

The State demands a monopoly on violence.
Yet violent criminals are seldom prosecuted,
While persons who defend themselves violently
Often face The State’s wrath.
Therefore, the criminal is an agent of The State.

     In the United Kingdom, which seemingly grows less united with each passing day, this appears incontrovertible. It also applies to parts of these United States.

     Give that some thought while I fetch more coffee.

***

     This is a few weeks old. It’s on my mind today because of the “death cults” theme:

     This is not a parody. Two bioethicists have argued in the prestigious professional journal Bioethics that we should breed ticks to cause more infections of a condition that causes an allergy to red meat. Seriously.
Why would anyone want ticks to become more dangerous? Meat-eating is wrong, and so anything (apparently) that causes fewer of us to eat meat is “beneficent“:

1. Eating meat is morally wrong.
2. If (1), then eating meat makes people morally worse and makes the world a worse place.
3. So, people would be morally better and the world would be a less bad place if people didn’t eat meat.
4. If an act makes people morally better and makes the world a less bad place than it would otherwise be, then that act is morally obligatory. [Corollary of consequentialism]
5. Promoting tickborne AGS [a tickborne syndrome that causes a meat allergy] makes people morally better and makes the world a less bad place.
6. So, promoting tickborne AGS is morally obligatory.

     “Bioethicists” -- ? How much would you be willing to bet that these... persons’ ethics stop short at ethical mandates such as “Thou shalt not kill,” eh? When “bioethicists” make statements such as “Life should end at seventy-five” (Ezekiel Emanuel) or “The elderly should not receive medical care” (Daniel Callahan), they forfeit any claim to being dispensers of “ethics.” They are death cultists, pure and simple.

     I could go on about this, but as I’ve done so before, and at length, I’ll spare you. Allow me one quick mention of my collection of essays on this subject, and I’ll allow us both to pass on to happier thoughts and climes.

     I may be back later. Stay tuned.

The Ultimate In Nihilism

     Today, via the esteemed Dystopic, we have an example of the sort of nonsense that spews from the terminally hangdog. If approached in the right frame of mind, it's an incredible spur to hilarity. Here's the meat of the writer's thesis:

     In 2006, I published a book called Better Never to Have Been. I argued that coming into existence is always a serious harm. People should never, under any circumstance, procreate – a position called ‘anti-natalism’.

     Author David Benatar, a "professor of philosophy at the University of Cape Town," is also billed as the "director of the Bioethics Center." One can easily guess what sits at the core of such a "thinker's" bioethics: death. Not that Benatar is alone in his sentiments:

     The idea of anti-natalism is not new. In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, the chorus declares that ‘not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best’. A similar idea is expressed in Ecclesiastes. In the East, both Hinduism and Buddhism have a negative view of existence (even if they do not often go so far as to oppose procreation). Various thinkers since then have also recognised how pervasive suffering is, which moved them to explicitly oppose procreation: Arthur Schopenhauer might be the most famous, but others include Peter Wessel Zapffe, Emil Cioran and Hermann Vetter.

     It's obviously not a new idea if it was expressed by Sophocles, who wrote five centuries before Christ. But insanity roared from many mouths is still insanity. And who are these other "thinkers?" What have they done for you lately?

     But let's treat with the essay itself, rather than Benatar's attempt to adduce authority to it by citing unknown "thinkers" who agree with him. A few snippets:

     Given how much misfortune there is – all of it attendant on being brought into existence – it would be better if there were not an unbearable lightness of bringing into being....

     Life is simply much worse than most people think....

     [I]t’s obvious that there must be more bad than good....

     Injury occurs quickly but recovery is slow....

     Many desires are never satisfied....

     We have to expend effort to ward off unpleasantness....

     The actual (almost) always falls short of the ideal....

     [I]t is difficult to escape the conclusion that all lives contain more bad than good, and that they are deprived of more good than they contain.

     Needless to say, Benatar has no objective basis for his proclamations. His entire essay ignores the question behind all evaluations: By what standard?

     But the fun doesn't end there.

---

     The inescapable implication of life inevitably being more bad than good, once that conclusion is reached, is suicide. But Benatar will have none of that:

     Asking whether it would be better never to have existed is not the same as asking whether it would be better to die. There is no interest in coming into existence. But there is an interest, once one exists, in not ceasing to exist.

     And whence does any such "interest" spring? Might it be...from life? But asking a "thinker" a direct and unambiguous question that demands a direct and unambiguous answer is considered dirty pool in "philosophers'" circles. At any rate, Benatar provides a substanceless evasion for the charge of cowardice:

     It can be the case that one’s life was not worth starting without it being the case that one’s life is not worth continuing. If the quality of one’s life is still not bad enough to override one’s interest in not dying, then one’s life is still worth continuing, even though the current and future harms are sufficient to make it the case that one’s life was not worth starting.

     There's that "interest in not dying" again. What's the basis, Professor? If "all lives contain more bad than good, and that they are deprived of more good than they contain" – your own words – what imaginable interest is there in continuing on to experience all that "bad?" The possibility of writing inane essays about the subject? No, no! Benatar tells us that "death is bad." If we leave aside this fresh, standardless evaluation, we are still compelled to ask: What makes death bad? The loss of life, no?

     Of course, the "100% mortality rate" attached to being born is a component in Benatar's landscape of doom:

     Death is the fate of everybody who comes into existence. When you conceive a child, it is just a matter of time until the ultimate injury befalls that child. Many people, at least in times and places where infant mortality is low, are spared witnessing this appalling consequence of their reproduction. That might insulate them against the horror, but they should nonetheless know that every birth is a death in waiting.

     But death is the price we pay for life. If there were no death, life would be impossible. What Benatar has argued here is that because life must end, therefore it should not begin – yet another standardless evaluation to which a sane man, equipped with some sense of reality and necessity, could never agree.

---

     Being a university professor, Benatar must include a nod to the less explicit anti-natalists:

     It is presumptively wrong to create new beings that are likely to cause significant harm to others.

     Homo sapiens is the most destructive species, and vast amounts of this destruction are wreaked on other humans....The optimists argue that prospective children are unlikely to be among the perpetrators of such evil, and this is true: only a small proportion of children will become perpetrators of the worst barbarities against humans. However, a much larger proportion of humanity facilitates such evils. Persecution and oppression often require the acquiescence or complicity of a multitude of humans.

     Here, Benatar refutes his own argument, though he would never admit it. If there is evil, then there is also good. By Benatar's unspoken standard, the evil outweighs the good, despite the non-mensurability of those things. But that billions of people embrace the concept of good and are willing to work to achieve its comparative form, "better," makes possible human progress. You know, the dynamic that has us living in houses with roofs, walls, windows, and floors instead of caves?

     Perhaps sensing the weakness of the above, Benatar then drones on about our "environmental damage" and "the immense harm that humans do to animals." But I think we can pass that by in safety. He has nothing new or substantial to say on the subject, and what he does say is quite as standardless as his evaluation of the worthiness of life.

---

     Howler after howler, all of it couched in the sort of pseudointellectual terms required to frame an insane argument as one worthy of consideration, and all of it adroitly constructed to evade the fundamental question: By what standard?

     If it weren't for a single consideration, Benatar's essay would be only one more specimen of the sort of garbage today's universities pay such persons hard cash to produce. But that single consideration looms appallingly large: Benatar's "reasoning" will be applauded, echoed, and used as a justification by the forces I've termed The Death Cults.

     The countermeasure is to laugh. He who can laugh at such pretentious, circular bullshit is armored against it. He who can get others to laugh at it is one of Mankind's unsung benefactors.

     Live, laugh, love, and be happy. Beget others who will live, laugh, and love you for having done so. Remember that you read it here first: as the Curmudgeon Emeritus to the World Wide Web, I decree it to be Immutable Law. "You can trust me, because I never lie, and I'm always right." (Firesign Theater)

     If the universe has any purpose more important than topping a woman you love and making a baby with her hearty help, I have never heard of it. – Robert A. Heinlein

A Fourth Kind Of Conviction

     [The following piece first appeared at the old Palace of Reason on May 4, 2004 – FWP]

---

     Some years ago, PBS imported a series of made-for-television dramas from England, which were scripted from the magnificent murder mystery novels of Phyllis Dorothea James, Baroness of Holland Park, better known to the world as P. D. James. All those dramas starred the fine British actor Roy Marsden as detective Adam Dalgleish of New Scotland Yard, who is the central character of one of Baroness James's series of novels. For your Curmudgeon's tastes, the best of those dramatizations was that of A Taste For Death, which is also one of the very best of Baroness James's novels. Your Curmudgeon has purchased it on DVD, and has been enjoying it with the C.S.O. these past few nights.

     The production values aren't the best. The series having been made for television, the picture is rendered in NTSC 4:3 aspect ratio, and is below typical DVD standards. None of that matters. The story, the pacing, the setting and the acting are all as gripping as they were first time around. Marsden is superb as always, and Penny Downie, who plays his assistant, Inspector Kate Miskin, makes her nominally supporting part glow. The pleasure of this reacquaintance is even more remarkable when one includes that your Curmudgeon had read the novel first.

     Particularly striking is a sequence involving a minor character: Sarah Berowne, estranged daughter to the murdered man, Sir Paul Berowne, a Home Office subminister in a Conservative administration. As is usual in Baroness James's mysteries, she provides a wealth of possible suspects and motives for the crime. Sarah's plausibility is provided by two factors: she stands to inherit a substantial sum, though short of independent wealth, from her father's estate; and she's a doctrinaire Marxist who reviles everything about British society, most especially its government.

     When Commander Dalgleish interviews her in the aftermath of the murder, among the things he probes is the nature of Sarah's estrangement from Sir Paul. Sarah's comment on the matter is too revealing not to share:

     My father thought our political differences were something we could discuss politely around the dinner table. What he didn't understand was that my politics are a faith.

     Imagine the above words spoken in a tone that combines the passion of total commitment with the revulsion of utter contempt for anyone who dares to differ.

     Your Curmudgeon has written before about his tripartite classification of convictions:

• Mathematics: Theses that can be proved or disproved.
• Science: Theses that can be disproved, but not proved.
• Religion: Theses that can neither be proved nor disproved.

     After pondering Sarah Berowne's statement above, and comparing it to the utterances of other Marxists he's known, your Curmudgeon has come to believe that that scheme is incomplete. A fourth category is needed: convictions retained in the face of conclusive disproof.

     A one-word label for such convictions that doesn't imply lunacy on the part of the holder is proving difficult to find. For now, let's call them ideological cults, or ideo-cults and their adherents ideo-cultists.

     Politics is rife with ideological cults, according to your Curmudgeon's standards for evidence. This is not to say that all questions of politics and public policy can be settled one way or the other for all time. However, some theories about what the State must, may, or must not do have been so thoroughly riddled with holes by the fusillades of experience that to retain them even in the most tentative and conditional form should occasion questions about one's respect for objective reality.

     What's significant in this connection is the array of defenses erected around the failed theory, or more accurately, around the minds of those determined to remain loyal to it. Eric Hoffer spoke of the "fact-proof screen" that an ideological cult tries to impose between its communicants and the evidence that would undermine their faith. While there is no doubt that these exist and are important, there yet remain ideo-cults whose members have been made aware of facts fatal to their creed, but maintain their allegiance anyway. Explaining these is harder.

     Possibly, one can get no closer than to examine the reactions of someone whose religious faith is undermined by the assertion of a contrary fact. For example, what would happen to Christian belief if it were demonstrated to a high degree of confidence that the remains of Christ had been found? Since that would undermine the traditional account of the Resurrection, it would be a heavy blow to orthodox Christian creeds. But it is not necessarily the case that all Christians would accept the immediate implications of such a discovery:

• Some would reject the assertion's accuracy, claiming that the researchers who made it couldn't possibly be right;
• Some would impugn the motives of the researchers, claiming that the assertion was known to be untrue and had been made out of malice toward Christianity;
• Some would spin alternative theories that would cover both the Resurrection and the remains.

     A claim about the discovery of Christ's remains would move Christianity out of the category of religion and into the category of science. Those determined to retain the Christian creed in its traditional form would either have to react scientifically, by invalidating the evidence or its implications, or hyper-religiously, by closing their minds to the disproof offered.

     Political ideo-cultists tend toward the religious pole. In the usual case, they simply refuse to engage the implications of contrary evidence. Often, they attack the motives or character of him who presents it. Their resistance grows stiffer, not weaker, with each new bit of adverse evidence adduced.

     Outreach expert Marshall Fritz, founder of Advocates for Self-Government, has counseled freedom activists not to expend their energies trying to convert people who are "into world domination." Analogously, if Smith evinces case-hardened hostility toward evidence that his convictions might be wrong, Jones would do better to avoid the matter in Smith's presence. Offering facts and logic is one thing; deprogramming is quite another, and not terribly well paid at that.

Thoughts On Conservatism Part 3: The Death Of Character

In response to the previous piece, commenter Magnus wrote:

What happened to our character? How is it that the world (including Christians) has become so coarse and lacking in virtue? Did we do this to ourselves? Was it orchestrated from without? Did we weaken ourselves, thus allowing evil to pounce on our weakened state? Now that we are here, how do we reverse the trend? I'm really at a loss.

It would appear that this is one of the critical questions of our time. Indeed, it might be the only one that ultimately matters.

---

"There is no substitute for character, and there is no rule about where you'll find it." -- Louis Nizer, My Life In Court

Character is a word susceptible to several interpretations. All but one are perversions: deliberate attempts to divert us from the proper understanding of our duties to ourselves and our places among our peers. A word can have only one exact meaning, and here is the one that pertains to any discussion of character in a sociopolitical context:

What you will permit yourself
when you cannot be restrained or punished for it
is the measure of your character.

H. L. Mencken brushed against this truth in a jocular way when he defined conscience as "the still small voice that warns us that someone might be watching."

Any exploration of character must start from a base of moral and ethical premises. One reaches that base by asking and answering fundamental questions about the nature of Man:

• What are our obligations to ourselves?
• What are our obligations to others?
• Once we have arranged to respect those, are we free to do as we please?
• If we are free politically, might we still be constrained by other considerations?

How we approach those questions will depend in large measure on factors such as upbringing, religious belief, intellect, individual maturity, and the possession of a functioning conscience. (Sociopaths need not apply.) However, their answers must converge on three absolute principles:

• Self-control.
• The Brazen and Golden Rules.
• The Noachite Commandments.

...regardless of the angle from which each of us approaches them.

Yes: must. When it is otherwise, we lack a functioning civil society. We are immersed in the Hobbesian "war of each against all," where the only ethical touchstone is can I get away with it and the sole measure of success is survival. As "no one here gets out alive," and anyway, survival in a Hobbesian state-of-nature / red-in-tooth-and-claw environment tends to be measured in ever smaller units, I, for one, find that condition unsatisfactory.

A rather humorless joke has some point here. Some years ago, the political-correctness-powered push to replace "judgmental" terms and phrases with "nonjudgmental" equivalents reached a depth of absurdity so great that a couple of wags produced a book lampooning the entire enterprise. The entry that comes to mind this morning is the replacement term for evil: "morally different." It was illustrated with a photo of Pol Pot, the butcher of Cambodia: "a morally different individual."

Give that a moment to sink in.

---

    "You know him, Kevin. You know his capacities. Do you think there's anything in this world that could hold him against his will?"
    Conway shook his head.
    "Nor do I. But if we're correct, then the only thing that could ever restrain him is his own self-restraint, a conscious decision not to reach out for what he wants. And he knows it."
    Schliemann picked up his mug from the little table between them, looked into it briefly, and set it down again.
    "God has made Louis a man that nothing can restrain. I don't presume to know His mind in this. I do know that He's equipped Louis not just with power, but with an understanding of his power that no amount of wishful thinking could overcome. And Louis has responded by teaching himself never to want anything beyond his necessities and the welfare of those he loves."

[From Chosen One]

Once restraint and punishment are subtracted from consideration, what remains to restrain us from acting on our desires immediately and with our full powers is our character.

This is not a condemnation of desire. Human life is fueled by desire; without it we would be mere vertebrate worms. But not all desires can be satisfied without doing harm, whether to others or to ourselves.

It is a persistent feature of the mentality that seeks power over others that it recognizes character as the foremost bastion against its aims. Not the character of the power-seeker, mind you; that of those he seeks to rule. For ultimately, no ruler can withstand the wrath of his subjects. Should they choose to turn on him, he will fall as surely as the night follows the day. Therefore, he must contrive to deflect their attention from his desires, expressed in his deeds, and onto the fulfillment of their own: he must destroy their characters.

There are several approaches to this:

• Eliciting rampant envy;
• Encouraging personal dissolution;
• Fostering a present-moment mentality;
• Replacing the sense of obligation with resentment;
• Creating a myth of villains and oppressors who "deny us what we deserve."

A wide range of tactics can be applied to each of those strategies. As I write this, all of them are in operation in these United States, and have been for decades.

External supports to character are more easily felled than most of us realize. Look at what's been done to Americans' attachment to our churches and Christian faith: wave after tidal wave of ridicule and absurd accusations of "exclusion." First we're skewered as idiots and dupes for daring to believe in God, in an afterlife, and in an absolute standard of right and wrong. Then we're told that by excluding persons who reject those beliefs, we're somehow oppressing them. Marry Adam to Steve in your cathedral or face the severest of all charges: intolerance!

Our attachment to the lessons learned at our mothers' knee falls even more easily. Those old folks just don't "get it." Things are different today. We have the Pill, motels, penicillin! Hapless John and naive Mary don't have to lose out from our use of their bodies. After all, they'll get a tickle, too. Love? Just a misspelling of "sex." Commitment? Who believes in that any more? Abortion? What's the big deal about that? It's just a blob of tissue.

Of course, what starts with a faceless "blob of tissue" doesn't stop there. It doesn't even stop with Kermit Gosnell:

BELGIUM: SENATE APPROVES MEASURE ALLOWING DOCTORS TO EUTHANIZE CHILDREN

by Steven Ertelt | LifeNews.com

The Belgian Senate voted today 50-17 to extend euthanasia to children with disabilities, in a move pro-life advocates worldwide had been fearing would come and expand an already much-abused euthanasia law even further.

The vote today in the full Senate comes after a Senate committee voted 13-4 to allow minors to seek euthanasia under certain conditions and the measure also would extend the right to request euthanasia to adults with dementia. There is still a chance to stop the bill in the House of Representatives, though pro-life campaigners fear it will become law....

“Currently the Belgian euthanasia law limits euthanasia to people who are at least 18 years old. This unprecedented bill would extend euthanasia to children with disabilities,” says Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition....

Dr Paul Saba of Physicians for Social Justice, is very concerned about the situation in Belgium.

“They are already euthanising people who are depressed or tired of life because they have taken the interpretations of saying physical and/or psychological suffering – you don’t have to have both, if you have one, why is that not enough? If you are suffering, it’s a personal experience and it would be discriminatory for someone to judge what a person is suffering,” he says. “What this teaches us is that despite the government’s assurances that they will set very strict criteria, that won’t work.”...

Some Belgian experts are supporting the extension of euthanasia to children with disabilities because they say that it is being done already. The same medical experts suggest that the extension of euthanasia will result in an increase of 10 to 100 euthanasia deaths each year.

The Belgian euthanasia law appears out-of-control. The Belgian Euthanasia Control and Evaluation Commission appear to be in a conflict of interest. The Commission supported the euthanasia deaths of: Nathan Verhelst (44) who was born as Nancy, Ann G who had Anorexia Nervosa and was sexually exploited by her psychiatrist, Mark & Eddy Verbessem, and at least one depressed woman. These are only the cases that we know about....

In the 20th Century: from Margaret Sanger to Adolf Hitler the goal was to rid the world of the disabled and Untermenschen.

How many of us can withstand such assaults on our characters, enduring them decade after decade as they swallow ever more of our society -- of our neighbors and friends -- and are glamorized and trumpeted as "the wave of the future" by beautiful bellwethers whose carefully sculpted, strategically unclothed bodies shine down upon us from 5000-inch screens? How many of us can protect our children from succumbing to them?

---

No discussion of this subject would be complete without mentioning the death cults. I delineated their program long ago:

• Abortion without restrictions.
• Assisted suicide.
• Involuntary euthanasia of those deemed untreatable or having "no quality of life."
• Compulsory surrender of the organs of the deceased for transplantation.
• Creation of embryos for research and therapeutic purposes.
• Government-enforced "triage" to conserve medical and financial resources.
• Compulsory acceptance of specified therapies.
• Procreation licenses.
• Government eugenics programs:
  • At first, as subsidies to couples with favored genetic characteristics;
  • Later, as compulsory donations of gametes for use in government-supervised breeding programs.
• Conscription for military purposes.
• Conscription for non-military purposes.

The overarching theme of all these measures, about half of which are already in place in various Western countries, is that human life has no intrinsic value and bears no intrinsic rights. By corollary, the individual's life does not belong to him, but to the State. The deliberate creation of human embryos in government-funded research centers, despite the revulsion it evokes from more than half the population of this country, is directly in line with this campaign. It's apparently the number-one goal of the pro-death forces at this time, despite lack of any indication of scientific or medical utility.

I maintain that the above is accurate in all particulars. But what matters most to this morning's topic is how it bears upon character:

What's the point to developing a sound character if the sole point of the exercise of life is death?

Should death be raised to an unchallengeable status, Cthulhu will rise and will reign unopposed. Whatever version of Newspeak should prevail in those final years of depravity and destruction will omit the word character from its lexicon. Assuming, that is, that in our unchained lust we bother to speak to one another at all.

---

How do we retrieve character from the abyss to which it's been consigned? Glory be to God, Gentle Reader: ask me one I can answer! I can see no course but to isolate oneself and one's family -- one's community, if that's possible -- from the surrounding world entirely. Venture out only when absolutely necessary; interact only with others of compatible convictions and practices. But try for just a moment to imagine how you'd go about that. In this day and age, is it even possible?

I don't know. I don't know of anyone who does know. For those of us of advanced years, whose children are already grown and whose energies have faded, it might not be possible even if there is a way. We're already passing into history...and being derided as fuddy-duddies, clueless old farts whose convictions have no relevance to this 24/7 / 500-channels / get-it-while-it's-hot / happenin' world, as we depart.

Know this, at the very least: They who encourage you to set aside considerations of character in favor of a laissez les bon temps roulez mentality are the enemy. They have an agenda that includes your subjugation -- and it would greatly ease their labors for you to do the hardest part for them.

Keep the faith.

Murder Is Murder...Except In New York And Virginia

     Writer L. Neil Smith trembles on the verge of a genuine come-to-Jesus moment...and it’s about BLEEP!ing time:

     People who know me, or are familiar with my work, understand that, as a libertarian—rather than a conservative—I’m a lifelong advocate and supporter of a woman’s natural right to control her own body, by means of an abortion, if necessary. In the past, not everybody agreed with me about that (I never expected them to), but it was relatively simple and straightforward.

     But now, the proto-communists who falsely call themselves liberals or progressives or democratic socialists or socialistic democrats or whatever, in their utter contempt for rational ethics, common decency, or the essence of what it means to be human, have made it necessary to add an asterisk, even to that relatively simple and straightforward idea.

     You’re probably aware that the legislatures of several East American states, including those of New York and Virginia, have been considering a new abortion law that not only permits the gynecological procedure at the end of the ninth month of pregnancy (it used to be the sixth, before the fetus was truly human), but at the very moment of natural birth, when it’s more accurate to call it “infanticide” than abortion.

     Ironically, newly elected Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has received far more critical attention for once having appeared in blackface than for his attempt to defend this new horror.

---

     Gentle Reader, let me say this once and only once in a big font, as it shouldn’t be necessary to repeat it:

An unborn baby is not mere “tissue.”
He is as human as you or I.
Therefore, abortion is not “health care.”
It is not a “safe medical procedure.”
It is murder.
The Left now defends the murder of born babies.
Where will they go next?

     A decent, life-respecting libertarian would never argue for a “right to choose” when what’s being “chosen” is the murder of a defenseless infant. That’s a big part of why I disassociated myself from the Libertarian Party and a number of other libertarian organizations of similar philosophy.

     It’s ironic that the child’s geographical position vis-a-vis his mother was regarded for so long as the factor that determined whether he had a right to life – and before you get on your high horse, I once accepted that argument. It seems in hindsight that the death cults knew that the birth canal-as-rights-demarcator would someday fall. So they bided their time until their movement could make progress on related areas such as embryonic stem-cell research and physician-assisted suicide. It seems their strategists have decided that the ground for legal infanticide has been adequately prepared.

     Please, God, let them be wrong.

---

     The firestorm this matter has ignited could prove to be the greatest gift the political Right has ever received. Back in the Sixties, when the possible legalization of abortion was being discussed in public fora, conservatives argued passionately that it would lead to infanticide...and were mocked and dismissed as doomsayers by the legalization advocates.

     Shortly after Roe v. Wade the advocates of legal abortion advanced the notion of unregulated abortion, abortion as a woman’s unconditional right at any stage of gestation. A couple of decades more passed, and we saw the emergence of “ethicists” such as Peter Singer and Daniel Callahan, some of whom openly argued for the legalization of “post-natal” abortions of infants with serious birth defects, but these received little attention from the press. And now we have politicians with significant profiles attempting to defend the proposition that the life of a fully-born human infant, entirely outside his mother’s womb, should be subject to a “discussion” between mother and physician.

     Where’s the laughter coming from now? Might it be this gentleman, who’s reputed to be a big fan of murder as entertainment?

     Or perhaps it’s that fellow over there in the red union suit, with the horns and the barbed tail. We’ve heard about him for millennia, though today discussing him and his agenda is somewhat...unfashionable.

     I’m not laughing. Are you?

The Naked Face Of The Enemy

I've considered long and hard. I've agonized. I've cast about for alternatives until all the skin has worn off my fingers. I've repeatedly refused to accept the implications of what my senses repeatedly told me. I simply can't do it any longer. The evidence is overwhelming.

America is currently in a state of civil war, and has been for some time.

It's not a conventional, easily recognized, flying-lead sort of war. That's what makes it so deadly. That's why the Right must win it. Should we lose, the carnage will be unimaginable.

I can practically hear what you're thinking: "Porretto has finally flipped his wig." Perhaps I have. That's always a possibility. As the saying goes, there's a fine line between genius and madness. But perhaps I'm right...and perhaps you've inhabited the same State of Denial in which I hid from reality for so very long.

We shall see.

* * *

I have several citations this morning. They don't stand alone. Indeed, none of them, in the absence of much other evidence would be significant at all. That's part of what makes the ongoing hostilities so lethal: it takes a perspective both wide and deep to grasp the pattern.

The first is from the esteemed Mark Alger:

...Police and Fire are the primary fiduciary responsibilities of government. They should be budgeted first and cut last.

An official was quoted as saying that the citizens he'd talked to didn't want to raise taxes to "pay for the fire department." How much you wanna bet he never heard any of them say, "... until you quit wasting taxpayer money on massage parlors and sweetheart deals for your brother-in-law."

Right?

Step into my office. I've just heard about this bridge...

Here lately, Teh Won has been on the stump (How is it proper for a government official to campaign for particular policies?) trying to persuade us that, if Congress doesn't raise the debt limit (How does that make sense?), we're going to lose [insert laundry list of sacred cows]. Bridges, roads, armies -- the latter day version of teachers, cops, firemen.

Saying nothing about bank bailouts, green energy boondoggles, union payoffs, CAGW scams, ACORN, and the rest of the treasury-looting going on...

Right.

No. What we want to do is bit-flip the selected duties of government which we are going to fund. We're going to start with your charter, fiduciary responsibilities, like protect the borders, run the courts, maintain the roads, deliver the mail. The rest of that crap can hold a bake sale.

The tactic employed by the unnamed official (and by Barack Hussein Obama) has a long and dishonorable history. It's called the Washington Monument Defense. It hearkens back to an incident in which, when Congress dared to reduce the rate of increase of the budget for the operation of the District of Columbia, the city's lower levels of government immediately retaliated by closing down Washington's most popular tourist attractions -- that is, by denying non-residents access to the only features of the city they really enjoy and value. The outcry was so sharp that Congress immediately restored the full amount the bureaucracy had demanded.

Like other items with the WMD acronym, the Washington Monument Defense can bring an opponent to heel with no more than a suggestion. Consider, if you will, this passage from William E. Simon's A Time For Truth, about the 1975-1976 New York City budget crisis:

When informed that cuts in jobs and in pay were inevitable, the municipal unions ran amok. It is only fair to say that Mayor Beame's cuts in the summer of 1975, under the supervision of the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), were deliberately inflammatory. They were calculated for the purpose of "proving" that the city needed state and federal aid. Beame dismissed nearly 5000 policemen and more than 2000 firemen (closing twenty-six firehouses) and fired nearly 3000 of the city's 10,000 sanitation workers. The unions understood that this was an act of political blackmail. In June 1975 the firemen's and policemen's unions published a four page leaflet which they distributed to tourists. Titled "Welcome to Fear City," with a lurid skeleton's head on the cover, the pamphlet advised visitors to New York to stay indoors after 6 P.M., avoid public transportation, and, "until things change, stay away from New York if you possibly can." In July the sanitation workers went on strike. They threatened to turn "Fear City" into "Stink City" and shouted from picket lines, "Wait till the rats come!"

Anyone familiar with New York City's monstrously bloated government -- no less so in the Seventies than today -- will realize at once that Beame and the aforementioned unions were playing the Washington Monument Defense. It worked, by the way.

* * *

The thrust of the Washington Monument Defense is obvious: Punish the citizenry for not conceding what the government has demanded. The original incident merely angered tourists to Washington, D.C. More recent invocations of the Defense have struck directly at the legitimate and proper functions of a government: defending the citizen against predation and maintaining peace and order in public places. Mark Alger's piece above describes the dynamics of such incidents beautifully.

The attitude that gives rise to the Defense is one that divides the nation into "us" and "them." The inside or "us" group is composed of those who regard their positions in government, or as beneficiaries of government, as theirs by right and not to be challenged or questioned. The outside or "them" group, against whom the Defense is wielded, is composed of everyone else -- i.e., those of us who are compelled by threat of punishment to pay for the State's activities. The Defense itself actuates the threat, albeit not in the conventional manner of indictment, trial, and imprisonment or expropriation.

Before I press onward, ask yourself: What makes the Defense possible? That is: what combination of circumstances and cessions produces a state of affairs in which the insiders -- government functionaries (elected, appointed, or hired) -- can deprive us on the outside -- private citizens under a nominal regime of self-sufficiency -- of the protections of life and property?

I'll return to this.

* * *

The Washington Monument Defense isn't the one and only weapon in the State's arsenal, but it does outline the mindset of those inside the "us" group:

If you're not one of us, you're the enemy. Any promises we might have made to you are not binding upon us. Our aim is to bring you to heel.

Of course, the candor of that implication doesn't entirely serve the "us" group. Insiders would generally prefer to maintain the facade of "service" -- i.e., that they're merely dedicated public servants straining to do their duties despite the obstinacy of the "them" group about providing what they "need." Toward that end they'll lie so baldfacedly as to create new low-watermarks in the annals of public deceit.

But there are lies and lies. Some lies are easier than others to establish and perpetuate. Take as an example the lie that labor laws, by which Washington can descend on a firm for not having hired enough Negroes, or cripples, or brain-damaged welders of Moldovian descent, actually serve the interests of those of us who work for a living. Or the lie that the many "affirmative action" (i.e., preferential treatment by race, sex, and ethnicity) laws truly improve the prospects of minorities and the character of the American workplace.

Let it be said at once that such intrusions into properly private relationships do nothing to help their supposed beneficiaries, but rather do them a great deal of harm. The statistics speak unequivocally on this point. Indeed, the apartheid regime of pre-Mandela South Africa was brought into existence in part by the imposition of minimum-wage laws; high-ranking members of the National Party admitted that they knew what result would come of them, and steered deliberately toward it. But for a member of the "them" group to speak openly about such effects is to court counterfire of the most devastating sort.

Which brings me to my second citation: a thirty-year-old essay by the great Thomas Sowell:

In the movie, Absence of Malice, lives are damaged and even destroyed by irresponsible reporting -- and the law offers no real protection. In real life as well, the most damaging, unsupported, and inaccurate statements about an individual can be written and broadcast coast to coast, without the law's offering any meaningful recourse. Judges have so watered down the laws on slander and libel that only in special cases can you nail those who are being irresponsible, vindictive, or even outright liars.

I know. As one who has taken controversial stands on various issues, I have been the target of a smear campaign for more than a year. Demonstrably false statements have been made about me in the media and positions attributed to me that are the direct opposite of what I have said for years in my own published writings. And yet a lawsuit would probably do nothing but waste months of my time, at the end of which the smear artists could slip out through one of the many loopholes -- and proclaim themselves vindicated and their charges substantiated.

[Applause to Mike Hendrix of Cold Fury for digging up this stunning piece.]

The entire essay is invaluable. It should be read and digested by every American with an interest in the consequences of supposedly well-intentioned public policies. Nor is Dr. Sowell, one of the nation's strongest and clearest voices for limited government, the only target the "us" group has attacked.

(An aside: In For The Defense, the second of F. Lee Bailey's legal autobiographies, he narrates the legal ordeal of Captain Ernest Medina, one of the officers accused of perpetrating the My Lai butchery. A telling passage in that tale concerns Time magazine's slanders against Captain Medina as he awaited trial, for which Bailey and Medina sued under the libel statutes. Time escaped the judgment by claiming, successfully, that Medina was a "public figure," and thus fair game for anything, by virtue of Time's own efforts to that effect. Enjoy the irony.)

To give the lie to an "us" group's representations is, in the minds of the "us" group, a declaration of war -- and they believe in total war, in which no weapon and no tactic are off limits. Their entire cadre of hangers-on in the communications trades will mobilize at once to destroy the target. The truth or falsity of their chosen shafts is never under consideration. Victory -- the silencing of the dangerous "them" voice -- is all that matters.

Compare that behavior to what totalitarian regimes have done to dissenters. Americans of the "them" persuasion aren't yet in fear for our lives, but it needn't remain so forever.

* * *

Some years ago, back at Eternity Road of late, lamented memory, I posted the following:

Just a few days ago was the first anniversary of the judicially sanctioned torture-murder of Terri Schindler-Schiavo by her soi-disant husband, Michael Schiavo. During that gruesome process, your Curmudgeon penned a cri de coeur that, had he had his druthers, would have been read by every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth.

To cut to the chase: it wasn't. At least, it wasn't taken to heart.

On March 2, 3, and 4 of this year, the Texas Academy of Sciences held its annual conclave, at which it awarded a certain Eric Pianka, a biologist at the University of Texas, with its Distinguished Texas Scientist Award. Whatever Dr. Pianka's achievements as a researcher or educator might be, they were overshadowed, for the moment at least, by his proposition that 90% of the human race must die:

"Every one of you who gets to survive has to bury nine," Eric Pianka cautioned students and guests at St. Edward's University on Friday. Pianka's words are part of what he calls his "doomsday talk" -- a 45-minute presentation outlining humanity's ecological misdeeds and Pianka's predictions about how nature, or perhaps humans themselves, will exterminate all but a fraction of civilization.

Though his statements are admittedly bold, he's not without abundant advocates. But what may set this revered biologist apart from other doomsday soothsayers is this: Humanity's collapse is a notion he embraces.

Indeed, his words deal, very literally, on a life-and-death scale, yet he smiles and jokes candidly throughout the lecture. Disseminating a message many would call morbid, Pianka's warnings are centered upon awareness rather than fear.

"This is really an exciting time," he said Friday amid warnings of apocalypse, destruction and disease. Only minutes earlier he declared, "Death. This is what awaits us all. Death." Reflecting on the so-called Ancient Chinese Curse, "May you live in interesting times," he wore, surprisingly, a smile.

So what's at the heart of Pianka's claim?

6.5 billion humans is too many.

In his estimation, "We've grown fat, apathetic and miserable," all the while leaving the planet parched.

The solution?

A 90 percent reduction.

That's 5.8 billion lives -- lives he says are turning the planet into "fat, human biomass." He points to an 85 percent swell in the population during the last 25 years and insists civilization is on the brink of its downfall -- likely at the hand of widespread disease.

"[Disease] will control the scourge of humanity," Pianka said. "We're looking forward to a huge collapse."

Let's get one thing straight before we proceed: Anyone who agrees with Dr. Pianka had better keep his hands where your Curmudgeon can see them.

An attitude like Pianka's can only come from an ivory tower. One must be utterly isolated from real life and real people to contemplate their extinction with such cheerful equanimity. Yet according to the linked story, Pianka is well supplied with admirers and acolytes:

Most of Pianka's former students are bursting with praise. Their in-class evaluations celebrate his ideas with words like "the most incredible class I ever had" and "Pianka is a GOD!"

Mims counters their ovation with the story of a Texas Lutheran University student who attended the Academy of Science lecture. Brenna McConnell, a biology senior, said she and others in the audience "had not thought seriously about overpopulation issues and a feasible solution prior to the meeting." But though McConnell arrived at the event with little to say on the issue, she returned to Seguin with a whole new outlook.

An entry to her online blog captures her initial response to what's become a new conviction:

"[Pianka is] a radical thinker, that one!" she wrote. "I mean, he's basically advocating for the death for all but 10 percent of the current population. And at the risk of sounding just as radical, I think he's right."

Today, she maintains the Earth is in dire straits. And though she's decided Ebola isn't the answer, she's still considering other deadly viruses that might take its place in the equation.

"Maybe I just see the virus as inevitable because it's the easiest answer to this problem of overpopulation," she said.

Of course, "this problem of overpopulation" is a completely impersonal matter. It has no bearing on the identities or futures of identifiable individuals. Were Miss McConnell asked if she expected to be among the doomed 90% or the fortunate 10%, what do you suppose she would say? Is it not likely that in her unspoken thoughts, she assumes herself to be among the architects of the annihilation, rather than an honoree?

Your Curmudgeon calls this the Commissar Complex. It puts him in mind of an anecdote from the 1848 French Revolution, when a coal-carrier scoffed at a lady of the upper classes: "Yes, madam, everything's going to be equal now. I'll go in silks and you'll carry coal." They who imagine the remaking of the world after their own preferences are like that.

Never imagine that they aren't serious. Consider the following:

"The ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty 'Good riddance!'" -- philosopher Paul Taylor in Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics

"Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet....Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." -- biologist David M. Graber, in review of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, in the Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1989.

But in keeping with the "death cults" motif, your Curmudgeon must emphasize the underlying attitude: Superior individuals, disdainful of the common herd and disinclined to rub elbows with them, theorize about the management of the hoi polloi while sipping Cointreau. Such management connotes a shepherd-to-sheep relation. Certainly it would include a willingness to "thin the herd" at need -- with need determined solely by the self-nominated master intellects in the closed circle.

"Kill five-billion-plus people because their continued existence offends us? Why not? Haven't we acceded to the deaths of millions of unborn children in the name of convenience? Haven't we argued that to let a child be born with a birth defect, or against its mother's will, is an act of 'wrongful life?' Don't we have such luminaries as Peter Singer to justify infanticide as a form of retroactive abortion? Haven't we condemned a president and his administration specifically for liberating two nations from monsters who were slaughtering tens of thousands each year? Haven't we argued in the highest chambers of power that 'a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,' and that rocks and moss and tundra are more precious than the human lives the oil beneath them could sustain? When we argued for those things, did anyone rise to stop us? Who could stop us now?"

Gentle Reader, I wish I had preserved for your edification the batch of hate mail I received after posting that piece. It was an undifferentiated mass of viciousness. You would have thought I'd come out in favor of executing homosexuals, or discriminating against rhythm-challenged Negroes, or the designated hitter rule. But if memory serves, not one of my correspondents dared to address the central thread of Pianka's lectures -- that the death of 90% of the human race would be a good thing -- even though Pianka himself has openly said so.

Why would a hate-mailer address that thesis? It's so clearly anti-human that only someone who actively hates other people and desires their destruction would adopt it. So anyone determined to defend Pianka, but equally resolved to represent himself as a "good guy," must treat Pianka's thesis as "off the table." He must assail the one who dares to express shock and horror that anyone could espouse such an idea as somehow evil.

Doesn't that suggest that the hate-mailer finds the thesis worthy? Doesn't it bring to mind the faux-equality of the Parisian coal-carrier -- the "Commissar Complex" mindset I alluded to in the above piece?

Which brings me to my third citation: a look at one of Pianka's more overtly genocidal fellow-travelers:

This is Finnish writer Pentti Linkola — a man who demands that the human population reduce its size to around 500 million and abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth — in his own words.

He likens Earth today to an overflowing lifeboat:

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.

He sees America as the root of the problem:

The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.

He unapologetically advocates bloodthirsty dictatorship:

Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. The best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and where government would prevent any economical growth.

We will have to learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves. A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life have been organized on the basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her.

As is often the way with extremist central planners Linkola believes he knows what is best for each and every individual, as well as society as a whole:

Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole. In this time and this part of the World we are headlessly hanging on democracy and the parliamentary system, even though these are the most mindless and desperate experiments of mankind. In democratic countries the destruction of nature and sum of ecological disasters has accumulated most. Our only hope lies in strong central government and uncompromising control of the individual citizen.

Linkola's ground assumption is that the current penetration of environmental alarmism is an adequate popular basis for his recommendations. He's wrong, of course; most Americans, at least, would not consent to having nine-tenths of their number liquidated and the survivors subjected to rigid totalitarian rule for any reason, much less to "save the planet." But his aim isn't truly to bring about mass death and totalitarian rule for the sake of the environment; it's to use "the environment" as the rationale for mass death and totalitarian rule. Indeed, he hardly bothers to disguise it.

The disturbing things about this vile notion are:

• That there are many, including many in the United States, who would call Linkola's unsubstantiated assumptions of ecological crisis, like those of the aforementioned Eric Pianka, rational and defensible;
• That the "us" group now promulgates those assumptions as dogmas beyond question;
• That those dogmas are now the overt basis of public policies at all levels of government;
• That anyone who gives these obscenities true coloration -- i.e., as expressions of hatred and contempt for Mankind -- will come in for the full vituperative, calumnious force of the "us" group, most particularly via their mouthpieces in the media.

Do you disagree? Read this, and tell me if you still do.

* * *

I hope my central point hasn't been lost among all the atrocities covered in the above. My tiny participation in the incidents I related is insignificant; I'm so far down the list of English-language political commentators that I don't deserve personal mention. The pattern beneath these incidents is what matters.

We are at war. Not by our decision -- that is, the wills of those of us in the "them" group -- but by those in the "us" group. The "us" group aims at our complete, unquestioning subjugation, a campaign in which effort no weapon is to be held in reserve, and no tactic deemed beyond the pale.

Bu really, that's only one of the major points I'd like to make today. The other concerns this snippet from an earlier segment:

Before I press onward, ask yourself: What makes the Defense possible? That is: what combination of circumstances and cessions produces a state of affairs in which the insiders -- government functionaries (elected, appointed, or hired) can deprive us on the outside -- private citizens under a nominal regime of self-sufficiency -- of the protections of life and property?

Like most of the genuinely basic questions about social and political affairs, to ask the question -- sincerely, determined to know the answer regardless of what it might tell us about ourselves -- is to answer it.

We are no longer self-sufficient.
We have ceded all responsibility for the protection of our lives, our property, and peace in the streets to The State.
The State has taken advantage of that cession to reduce us ever more completely to helplessness before it -- in some regions, mainly psychological helplessness, but in others objective helplessness as well.
The State has compounded our subjugation by creating numerous mascot groups, some of which are merely strident, others of which are ready and eager to use violence, in support of the State's overall agenda.
Our response to these developments has mostly been to shrug.

Please, please, please: Interpret "the State" broadly, not narrowly. Anyone who, for any reason, wields coercive force or the threat thereof to compel obedience to some external dictum is at that time and in that place an agent of the State. Ask Massachusetts ice cream vendor Mark Duffy whether it mattered to his livelihood whether the "armed environmental police" were hirelings of Washington, or Massachusetts, or the town of Carlisle, or claimed to be "private citizens" solely interested in "the public good." Ask him whether he would have regarded an equal or greater force that dared to stand in his defense against those "armed environmental police" as enemies, or as courageous and infinitely praiseworthy American patriots.

Then ask yourself whether, should you ever be in a position comparable to Duffy's, such a force is at all likely to appear in your defense.

* * *

Political salvation has become extremely unlikely. Yes, I meant what I said in this essay about the desirability of buying time. We need time for the general recognition of the war between "us" and "them" to burgeon and mature. But I can't see a reversal of the trend through political mechanisms alone as plausible.

If that's the case, we can go in only two directions from here:

• Acceptance of de jure subjugation, coupled with as much "underground resistance" as is possible to us;
• Open armed revolt.

We are not ready to revolt. Not only do far too many Americans still believe in "the system;" there aren't enough of us ready, willing and able to put "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" at risk for a chance at a Constitutional restoration. Among the Constitutional movement's weaknesses is that too many of us are in our "declining years." Though we recognize the rumble of Juggernaut's carriage, we're far more inclined toward "riding it out" than taking up arms against it.

Far more Americans must grasp the enormity of our common plight before an overt uprising would have a significant chance of success.

* * *

One cannot recognize a state of war yet deny that an enemy exists; the latter posture makes the former impossible. My overriding purpose in the above was to make it more difficult to deny the existence of the enemy -- to some extent, to give us of the "them" group "a face to hate."

I wish I could think of a way to end that last sentence with some other phrase. Hatred is always destructive. Indeed, it's the engine of willed destruction itself: the conscious desire to do harm to someone else. Christians are enjoined against hatred...with one exception:

Then an experience that perhaps no good man can ever have in our world came over (Ransom) – a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred came over him. The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt, without some dim knowledge that he was failing to distinguish the sinner from the sin, rose into his arms and legs till he felt they were pillars of burning blood. What was before him appeared no longer a creature of corrupted will. It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an instrument. Ages ago it had been a Person: but the ruins of personality now survived in it only at the disposal of a furious self-exiled negation. It is perhaps difficult to understand why this filled Ransom not with horror but with a kind of joy. The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for. As a boy with an axe rejoices on finding a tree, or a boy with a box of coloured chalks rejoices on finding a pile of perfectly white paper, so he rejoiced in the perfect congruity between his emotion and its object.

Elwin Ransom's Adversary was already damned. We cannot wish for -- certainly not labor for -- the damnation of the "us" group; that's theological hatred, hatred unto eternity, which is the worst of all kinds. But we can ardently desire their downfall and disgrace. We must look upon their faces, not merely as a group but as individuals, dispel the notion that they're simply "misguided," acknowledge the enmity between us, and respond to their ill-concealed desire for our subjugation with a confident, justified desire for their ruin. More, until we allow ourselves to do so, we will make no headway at restoring liberty and justice to these United States.

A Lost Life Purpose

Single people used to have ways to give their lives purpose.

• They could join religious orders, fitting themselves into a quasi-family, and bringing them a sense of a higher purpose.
• They could join the military as a career. In the old days, the pay/benefits generally didn't afford those beneath the officer level to take a spouse - and, for women, they would not be able to both have children and a military career. So, many of them dedicated themselves to their particular service during their active career. Some would have a late-in-life marriage, or live with/near family, or just retire to a quiet life of fishing and golf.
• They could live at home with parents and other family members, taking care of aging family, running the family farm. Being the unmarried uncle or aunt to many grateful nieces and nephews. Some would work outside, and contribute money to launch the lives of other family members. Others would foster children in times of family crisis or need.
• Hard as it is for today's youth to believe, many single people in previous times worked jobs that did NOT pay a "living wage", and only were able to stay alive because there was room and board (for ONE person) included with the job - household help, farm labor, cowboys. They were never able to save enough to afford to get married. That was also true of the enlisted men of pre-WWII times. What many of the career military did was to work until their pension would kick in, then marry a younger woman, or a widow with children. In essence, they time-delayed their family formation.

When did those purposes stop being sufficient? If you look to history, when a significant number of women no longer had an prospect of getting married to their social equals, that would be in the post-Civil War period. There had been some growth in unmarried upper class women before that time - that's the group that largely fulled the abolition, women's rights, and temperance movements.

But the flood of single ladies with little to occupy them overwhelmed the society after the Civil War's end. Some had little money, and needed to find ways to earn it. That need, and the growing numbers of women who devoured the books and magazines of that time, allowed some of them to make a living writing - some of the early feminists tried their hand at that trade, including Louisa May Alcott and Ida B. Wells. Their writing wasn't always revolutionary; many wrote tepid romance novels and fashion magazine articles.

Some, who had a slight independent income (although not enough to entice a potential spouse), threw themselves into politics, becoming the "Goo-Goos", the Good Government advocates. Like too many RINOs today, they believed passionately in Reform, and in the benefits that passing laws to outlaw graft, corruption, and fraud would bring to government.

Decade by decade, women lost their meaning in the traditional existence. Modern home machinery took away the back-breaking work, but it also reduced their sense of importance. They traded leisure for lack of purpose. They tried replacing that void with:

• PTA and other parental involvement activities
• Local charities and public-service organizations
• Social activities, formal and informal
• Crafts, cooking from scratch, and gardening - not from need, or desire, but to fill those lonely hours
• Shopping, traveling, lunching

Single women, after mid-century, tried to use jobs to replace that sense of purpose. Others engaged in sexual escapades, often with random strangers.

And, the men?

Aimless chasing after sexual adventures, drinking, gambling, gaming, and - for the very young - playing sports.

But, seldom any involvement in civic affairs, community organizations, or churches. That was left for the women. The idea of spending your leisure time improving your mind, or your community, was just not considered.

Notice what happened?

Except for alcohol-fueled outings, men and women conducted separate lives. No wonder so many say that they don't seem to be able to meet the opposite sex. They live completely disjointed lives.

Society needs to find ways for not-married non-parents to live a fulfilled life. The massive growth in Leftist adherence is largely due to the fact that they have created a means of doing so. By joining AntiFa, Woke Culture, or political activism on the Left, those without meaningful personal interactions gain a purpose for their lives.

A few years ago, the book The Purpose-Driven Life became a best-seller. That book, and others purporting to map out a blueprint for a meaningful life, speak to the deep hunger our culture has for spiritual meaning. Without our traditional focus on God, Americans have turned to other causes that provide a similar sense of purpose - such as BLM. It's no surprise that today's young people are turning to a mission that links them to the historical Civil Rights movement - their hunger to be a part of something bigger than themselves is powerful.

Perhaps most of history's causes were less about alleviating wrongs, and issuing in those who would correct abuses, than about filling that God-sized hole in their lives. I just hate to see so many people throw away their lives on those causes that are so intimately connected with the Death Cults of the Left.