Sunday, January 08, 2006
MoronWatch: Excuuuuse Me For Living
Jeff's reaction was priceless:
While you queens have been frauleining about gay marriage, homos under barmy Islam have been crushed, hung, stoned, & beheaded. I notice that 60% of British Muslims want Shariah law. Have you seen their birthrate compared to non-Muslim Brits? Maybe GLHA should start running more timely articles like Scaffold-Proof Styling Mousse & Fabulous Accessories from Neck to Toe!
George Bernard Shaw, that pacifist flaneur, said if the Nazis landed, he'd welcome them as tourists. New flash, sisters: the tourists are already in the house. Under Shariah, you'll really be giving head, & not in a good way. Then you'll be clicking your Giorgio Brutini heels together for asylum in Kansas, but we have enough problems without a bunch of grievance queens & speech monitors. Besides, you'd really hate our First Amendment; it doesn't go well with yellow.
Your friend,
Jeff
I'll leave you to the rest. After reading this inflammatory summary, I couldn't wait to see the bile-filled, racist screed that launched a thousand flapping lips. Imagine my shock when I finally located an excerpt over at Reich Reason. Bloody fascists is right:
"Controlled immigration is sometimes economically necessary and can be socially beneficial, but, since the 1990s, the effective loss of control over our borders (officially, 1 per cent of the population are now illegal settlers) has led some commentators to claim - quite convincingly - that our population is growing by the equivalent of a city the size of Cambridge every six months.
"Legal or illegal, many of these Third World and Eastern European newcomers are criminals of the worst kind, and many more are hopelessly ill equipped to live in a complex Western democracy, unable even to speak English in some cases. A parasitic few are bent on the destruction of Western civilisation.
"Our history, traditions and our evolved democratic values mean little or nothing to them. The official line has always been that immigrant newcomers would assimilate themselves and, of course, many have done. By and large, Jews, Sikhs and Hindus have integrated rather well, maintaining a strong cultural identity while somehow managing to meet the host community halfway and contributing a great deal to our society (more, in many respects, than some of the dissolute members of our tragically disinherited working class).
"Let us be quite clear that race is not the issue here, as racism is the antithesis of Humanism. We are not concerned where people come from, genetically or geographically, but we ought to care very much about where they are going, ideologically. Racial discrimination is abhorrent, but the meaning of racism, for Humanists, has to remain very narrowly defined. It is not racist to be anti-immigration or anti-Islam, or believe in strictly selective immigration like Canada and Australia.
This is clearly the kind of knuckle-dragging hate speech that must be quashed with the utmost vigor. And post-haste, too. Incorrect thoughts are dangerous and must not be allowed to poison the larger discourse.
Is this what we've come to, in the end? What ever happened to the Hegelian dialectic? You know... that whole clash of ideas thingy? Thesis - antithesis - sythesis? It's all rather difficult, isn't it, when you shut off the discussion midstream. I couldn't help recalling a line from an old John Cougar Mellancamp song; ironically, he's got to be the biggest proponent of the type of wooly-headed thinking that got us into this predicament in the first place. At any rate, it goes something like this:
"You've got to stand for something
Or you're going to fall
For anything..."
But Western Civilization doesn't really stand for anything, anymore does it?
We've become too civilized: too tolerant. So tolerant we can't even tolerate differences between people anymore, because recognizing distinctions and then accommodating them requires too much effort. So we just gloss over them with the kind of psychosomatic, selective blindness that allows us to indulge our preferred prejudices. This allows us to safely hate the real enemies in our midst: Christians. Jews. White male wage earners who make over $75,000 a year.
We've replaced true tolerance with the kind of half-baked indifference that comes from no longer caring. The barbarians are at the gates, but no one cares enough to defend the walls, and besides everyone knows 'barbarians' is a perjorative term that seeks to demonize the Other: just another tool of the dominant culture used to marginalize and oppress the struggling masses. The things we once viewed as worth fighting and dying for - liberty, equality, democracy - are now just fancy buzzwords. We trot them out every now and then to feed our outrage, but we wouldn't dream of actually doing anything about them lest we be suspected of harboring revanchist tendencies.
The enlightened person can no longer afford concepts like "good" and "evil". They're so absolute. So uncompromising. They require the making of value judgments, and that means drawing troublesome lines in the sand, and before you know it one is expected to actually step across them. "Better off" all depends on one's point of view, and the prospect of watching your wife or daughter being gang-raped or fed, feet-first, into a plastic shredder under Father Saddam is infinitely preferable to chancy electrical power under a democratic government. All we want is for the trains to run on schedule - is that too much to ask? That, and the right to condemn Americans as fascists for imposing democracy on other cultures who are free to - and may still, despite our best efforts - reject it.
...as Steyn points out, “multiculturalism” is utterly flummoxed by monocultural Islamists; it has no arguments against it, and appeals to some gaseous modern conception of “European” values evaporate upon contact with the hot implacable nature of the up-and-coming culture.
The telling line in Steyn's piece quotes that fine Gaul Jean-Francois Revel: "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."
Several months ago in a personal essay on tolerance, I mused:
To conflate tolerance of destructive or criminal behavior with tolerance of differing skin colors, religions, or cultures is absurd in the extreme. It also, in the end, undermines the goal it seeks to uphold: tolerance of those who are different from us by linking unacceptable behavior to race, religion, ideology, or ethnicity.
Our often-quixotic quest for 'diversity' and 'tolerance' is rapidly producing a society that has precious little use for either virtue. Willful blindness is not tolerance any more than diversity of skin color without intellectual diversity represents true willingness to explore differences in how people live and think. Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks believed that without a well-developed notion of civic virtue, no society could long survive. In the intervening centuries, the notion of what constitutes the civil society has continued to evolve, for the most part moving from a notion of collective duty or virtue to one where only the individual's rights are recognized. Sadly, the idea that an individual has any duty to society seems to have fallen into disfavor.
Especially in America we fear this notion: that we as individuals can be asked to limit our freedoms from a sense of obligation to something larger than ourselves. But in a large, increasingly complex, multicultural world how will we ever live together in peace if there is no common loyalty, no sense of community, no feeling that we are all in this together?
In a piece about John Murtha yesterday, I mentioned that he might want to consider, if he ever managed to shut up long enough, the meaning of the Marine Corps motto: Semper Fidelis. But the same question might well be asked of our society of a whole: to what values are we, collectively, willing to remain faithful? What do we still believe?
Have we really subliminated all our common ideals to some half-baked, loony notion of 'tolerance'? Because if we have, the way of life we enjoy, and our very freedoms are not long for this world. If we no longer care enough to champion the forces of reason against idiotarians like this, then I wonder what kind of world my grandchildren will inherit.
UPDATE: Two years of writing on my own site, for readers who know me well, have made me a bit lazy. I posted this on another site as well this morning and it was obvious that not everyone understood my point; which was not so much to defend the second excerpted passage as to argue that false tolerance (i.e., blanket tolerance based on skin color, ethnicity, or religion that is so extreme that it results in either suppressing speech or turning a blind eye to criminal or destructive behavior) is not only just another form of prejudice. It is dangerous.
Speech and ideas, in and of themselves, aren't generally harmful and we don't need to criminalize them. It's when people go overboard and want to stretch "tolerance" so far that we are told we have to accept everyone unconditionally on the basis of skin color, no matter what they do that it gets ridiculous.
I'm not entirely sure what prompted TigerHawk's post (above) but I am aware that my sarcasm (especially when I'm angry) often makes me appear more extreme that I am. I won't apologize for my opinions in this case. Stoning homosexuals makes me extremely angry. So does burning Jews. I don't believe people of the Jewish faith should have to leave a country, as they are now leaving France in droves, because they fear for the safety of their children and because a cowardly government will not protect them, nor admit there is a problem.
In my opinion, anyone who fails to get extremely angry over these things: who tolerates them, has only my deepest contempt.
3 Comments:
By 
TigerHawk, at
Sun Jan 08, 02:06:00 PM:
Four disjointed points:
An enormous amount of blood has been shed all over the world -- Europe, the United States, Africa, Asia -- because people hated each other because of who they were. We all put up with this until the Europeans under German rule industrialized the slaughter of people they thought were inferior. The reaction to that final atrocity has been an extreme sensitivity to any generalization about any ethnic, racial or religious group. If liberal Germany could slide into the Holocaust, the fear is that any country might extend the logic of even petty hatreds into a similar mass crime. Mere jawboning will not reverse this sensitivity -- only a great tragedy that teaches the opposite lesson will, and the retribution that follows that tragedy will be horrible.
By giving up their ability to control their own borders, the countries of the European Union are deciding not to be countries any more. Eventually, one of them (the Danes?, the Brits?) will realize this and start controlling their borders. This will create a tremendous political crisis within the European Union.
Is religion a fundamental condition, like race or ethnicity, or is it a set of opinions, like being a Republican, or a Communist? If the former, we are reluctant to generalize about the adherents of a particular religion. If the latter, why the hell not? My own view is that one's religion is just another set of opinions, but my view is not widely accepted among either religious people or those who don't like them.
Finally, are most people too stupid to make careful judgments in these questions? Is that why we have simple rules, because we know if we condone some criticism of, say, Muslims but not other criticism, there will be a lot of morons who beat up the next Muslim guy they see? Perhaps we need simple rules, knowing we will err one way or the other. One simple rule is "Do not make general statements about racial, national, or religious groups." Another simple rule is "If there's another group that threatens your survival, do what you need to do to survive." If you believe that only simple rules will work, on which side do you want to err?
By Cassandra, at
Sun Jan 08, 07:14:00 PM:
I am sliding into an insight on tolerance, and it is, I think, an important one:
I have, all my life, been an extremely tolerant person. I personally do not give a rats ass if you worship Baal, if you don't believe in anything, if you bugger goats in your basement. I really, truly *do not care* so long as you are not hurting anyone and you do not want to tell me about it.
Oh, and I don't want to watch home movies of your LaBoyer delivery either, thank you very much. Been there, got the stinking T-shirt twice.
That said, I find that most other people are not *nearly* as wonderful and enlightened as *I* am :) They will tolerate Baal worship and Wiccas, but draw the line at goat buggery. Or they don't much mind the goat thing but the whole Baal worship deal really gives them the willies.
So the problem with "tolerance" when it gets codified is this: just like Orwell's Animal Farm, all the animals are equal, but some animals are most definately more equal than others.
And now you are putting the weight of law enforcement and the State behind this BS. And that is just plain wrong: talk about your Establishment Clause violations! All in the name of *avoiding* a State religion! We have that now in the US. In public schools, you can talk about Islam or Buddism in the name of multiculturalism, but not Christianity. You have elevated those religions to the status of "state-approved" religions. Wrong answer. This is what, to use that phrase that so amused you a few weeks ago, 'chaps my ass' about this issue. It is state-sponsored discrimination, in the name of 'tolerance' and I'm not buying it.
And in the EU, it's worse. In the name of "tolerance" they are shielding radical Islamofascists who are committing violent acts against Jews. With their history, I can't BELIEVE they are doing this. I fear - I really fear - for the Jews of Europe. I don't hate all Muslims. By and large I believe they are good and decent folk. But there is a moral failing when they fail to condemn the zealots in their own midst who commit these horrible acts - when they fail to turn them in. And I won't say it's right.
They are using "tolerance" as an excuse for moral blindness.
And it's wrong. These "simple rules" can and ARE BEING misused and the real problem is that they are being codified, and that puts the weight of law and government behind them.
Individual stupidity I can handle. But zero tolerance policies never work well - they are an excuse for people and institutions to pass the buck and stop thinking.
And that is never right.
By 
, at
Sat Aug 25, 04:38:00 PM:
I like most of your stance, but wish you had credited John Le Carre for this: "half-baked indifference that comes from no longer caring," a (verbatim?) line of George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Thanks.
