“There is an ironically neocolonial feel to the cultural elites’ absolution of Hamas. It is their indoctrination into the politics of identity that leads them to view Israel as the culpable adult in this relationship and the Palestinians as blameless children. Critical-race-theory narratives about white privilege and brown victimhood have led to a situation where not only are whites demonised as powerful and destructive but also non-white people are patronised to an obscene degree as non-powerful and pathetic. This hollow, pat explanation for every political event has now been cut-and-pasted on to the Middle East (despite the fact that Israel is not a ‘white’ country). The end result? Both Israelis and Palestinians are denuded of their humanity, the former damned as the conscious authors of all ills, the latter reduced to the moral infants of world affairs, whom ‘nobody should blame’ even ‘for the things we do’, in Hamad’s words. The anti-Israel elites take a far more racially paternalistic view of Palestinians than Israel does.”
– The relentlessly quotable Brendan O’Neill, at Spiked.
Another crushingly good paragraph:
“There is a serious danger in the neo-racist absolution of Hamas. It serves as a green light to further terror. For if you are never held to account for what you do, you can do anything you like. Hamas now knows, from the global fallout from its pogrom, that it will always be absolved. That it enjoys a kind of moral impunity among the opinion-formers of the West. That its mass slaughter will be contextualised, explained, forgiven. That even its use of civilian buildings and civilian vehicles to store and transport the machinery of its war crimes will not bother the consciences of those who pose as pro-Palestinian. Our elites have done something even worse than blame Israelis for their own deaths – they have signalled to Hamas that if it were to do the same again, there would be no moral consequences. Its blamelessness would remain intact. The failure of our intellectual elites to condemn the Hamas pogrom is an implicit approval of future pogroms.”
Read the whole thing, as the saying goes.
By the way, the expression “intellectual elite” deserves to be covered in scare quotes. “Elite” implies quality, but I see little evidence of it.
Every Brendan O’Neill and/or Spiked article must included reference to ‘elites’, presumably it’s a contractural obligation. If they had an article about seagulls stealing food from tourists there would doubtless be a reference to ‘birding elites’.
psol: indeed. O’Neill claims to be a Marxist, for what that’s worth these days.
I should point out that I agree with much that BO’N writes, and also enjoy his entertaining writing style (‘elites’ apart).
He has been a voice of sanity on many crucial issues in recent years.
The ‘left’ seem quite divided on the conflict. On one hand you have the DSA, Corbynista, Jacobin, Novara media types who are predictably pro-Palestinian. On the other you have the Starmers, the German SDP, Biden, and even an ultraleftist Senator Fetterman in the US lean to Israel. You have the spectacle of certain leftists being cancelled in institutions supposedly for their opinions on the conflict. They usually blame right-wingers for this, ignoring the fact that institutions like Ivy league universities, science journals and the like don’t have any right-wing employees anymore (if they ever did). The ‘cancelling’ is purely intra-left. And therefore a lot of fun to watch!
And therefore a lot of fun to watch!
Indeed. A certain amount of schadenfreude is afforded by all this.
For the Marxist always have been like this:
“We are the proletariat we can do anything”
“We are oppressed we can do anything”
Hamas: “We are victims we can do anything”
The attitude of the Corbynist left to all this is indeed sickening. They have certainly encouraged Hamas. The good thing is that after the Israeli action is over, there will be a lot less Hamas to worry about.
The soi-disant “elite” and other members of our supposed “meritocracy” have lost sight of the essential fact of such a thing: In order to maintain anything like a meritocracy, one must, now and again, demonstrate some actual merit.
Haven’t seen that since… Oh, I dunno, maybe the noblesse oblige that drove many of the upper class to serve as officers on the Western Front, leading men in hopeless charges against machineguns? As misguided as that was, and as militarily ineffectual as a lot of those attacks were, they still got themselves out in front and demonstrated the courage of their convictions. Today’s equivalent? LOL… Yeah, right; they’ll get right back to you about all that “signing up” thing, and will wear the white feathers they’re awarded with aplomb. Not that their side-chick feminine equivalents would be handing those out, as judgmental as they would have to be…
We live in a sadly diminished age, in so, so many ways. Might be for the better, though… The “elites” are steadily discrediting themselves, and will shortly find themselves on the dust-heaps of history. Manifestly, that is precisely what they deserve.
Who is the worst racist – the one who thinks of the Other as less able, or the one who thinks of the Other as SO less able as to be rightly denied agency and responsibility?
It is one of the savage ironies of history.
Herbert Marcuse and the others were, mostly, from Jewish families – yet they have created a movement, Frankfurt School Marxism, now “Critical Theory” Marxism (or just “Woke” “Identity Politics”) that now wants to exterminate Jews.
But the movement has an evil logic to it – if inequality = injustice, if inequality is, by definition, “exploitation and oppression” then Jews, often “Tall Poppies” in everything from music to business, are natural targets. Nor is it just the Frankfurt School Marxists – Karl Marx himself (another person from a once Jewish family) ranted insanely about Jews – “What is the religion of the Jew? Hucksterism! What is the God of the Jew? Money!” and-on-and like some some street corner Nazi thug – Dr Karl Marx also ranted insanely about “Niggers” and explained how it was a natural that a political rival represented an area of Paris that contained the Zoo as being a “Jewish Nigger” he was “closer to the animal kingdom than the rest of us”.
Such is the idol of the Woke college students – with their obsession with “micro aggressions” and their total lack of concern about the 100 MILLION MURDERS by the Marxists, around the world, since the coup in Saint Petersburg 106 years ago today.
After a little thought, I believe I’ve reached a possible explanation for a lot of what has been going wrong around the Western world since the end of WWII.
Basically, it’s a cyclic thing: We’re at that point on the sine curve of history where the “establishment elite”, if you will, has managed to succeed too much, and is now in the process of demonstrating that it isn’t fit for the changes happening around us. They’re adapted, very well, to “that which went before”, and not at all to today’s challenges. As such, they’re discrediting themselves about as effectively as the old-school landed aristocracy did around the time of the Napoleonic Wars or the Victorian/Edwardian types did during WWI. Change is coming, and it’s not going to pretty or easy; the old way of doing things isn’t working, and something new needs to come along.
I think a lot of this is going to rebound off the school system we have in place, the lock-step credentialing process that does little to actually help people reach their real potential, and which has been substituting half-ass indoctrination for real education since at least the 1960s.
The final straw for me was when I found out that the Board of BlackRock (which controls ten TRILLION worth of shares – thanks to twisted tax laws and the endless Credit Money of the Federal Reserve) believes this stuff – they believe in this “Critical Theory” modern Marxist “Woke” stuff that, of course, seeks to destroy Israel (as inequality is injustice – by definition it is “exploitation” and “oppression”) and, you guessed it, the Board is headed by Jewish people – pushing their own destruction (because they are very wealthy – and inequality is inequity).
The board does NOT know what they are pushing, they may be personally be pro Israel, but the movement they are pushing (DEI, EDI – whatever you want to call it) of course seeks to destroy Israel as well as destroy the United States and all other Western “capitalist” countries.
So it a bit more than student air-heads – it is both the government and corporate bureaucracy.
Tom Wolfe argued, in a discussion with Mark Steyn, that the students would forget the Marxist stuff when they left college – Mark Steyn argued that the Marxism would stay with them (even if they did not know it was Marxism – in fact ESPECIALLY if they did not know it was Marxism).
Mark Steyn was correct.
They do not even seem to know they are pushing Marxism – because, in spite of being very wealthy, they are ignorant, deeply ignorant.
@Paul Marks,
See, the really interesting thing about those deaths due to attempted socialism/communism? To the true believers, those aren’t actually flaws, they’re the end-state: You have to get rid of all those non-conforming “wreckers” in order to achieve “True Communism”, and murdering them is the quickest way to do it.
Communism is a cut-rate half-ass religion. One that has somehow managed a whole hell of a lot of attraction for way too many people, down the years… I don’t know what the final tally is going to be for how many people it kills, but I imagine that the rest of the religious/ideological cults are going to be a lot lower. I mean, even Islam lets you convert; the Communists? Once a member of the bourgeoisie, always a member of the bourgeoisie. Which is odd, because they’ll forgive you for being one of the aristocracy a hell of a lot quicker than for being one of the middle-class…
The whole thing is pathologic, when you get down to it. Envy, more than anything else, motivates the average socialist. They also do all they can to tear down the things that make people successful members of the middle-classes, like hard work and normal sex lives. From the things they advocate and agitate for, you can tell they really don’t have your best interests at heart, at all.
As for the alliance of the left with Islam.
I have a suspicion that the left will not end up using Islam as its puppet – that it will end up being the other way round, and that when the Western “Woke” Marxists are no longer useful to Islam – they will have their throats cut. “Oh dear, how sad, never mind”.
Islam is a great civilisation – which has lasted 14 centuries and has a system of thought designed to conquer and survive. The left (the left hand road to Hell – the left is the enemy of righteousness) from Rousseau and Marx is a clown show – a sick farce, which can kill and destroy, but can NOT create long lasting societies of its own.
And Frankfurt School “Woke” Marxism, with its “Trans Rights for children!” and “mathematics and reading are racist!”, is the most stupid (vicious – but still stupid) thing the left has ever produced. It is not a new social system, not a society of its own, it is just destruction and decay.
And that the bureaucrats of the vast “Capitalist” corporations side with this excrement is the most farcical element of it all.
I’d be rather cautious in labeling Islam a “great civilization”. They’ve got very effective propagandists and a wonderful line on proselytization by the sword, but past that?
Where the hell are the accomplishments? What have they done? Everything I can think of has been stolen or appropriated from other, actually greater, civilizations that they then suppressed the hell out of. Where is the Persian poetry of Omar Khayyam, these days? Where is the great artistry, the magnificent science?
Diddly-squat exists, because in Islam, if it ain’t in the Koran, it ain’t real. That’s why they never took any of those accomplishments they built off of anywhere at all. The cultural/religious matrix suppressed all of that, and it never grew. When you can’t contradict the “revealed word” or correct it…? That’s one of the things that held the West back for so long, that you couldn’t say anything that opposed the revealed word of authorities like Aristotle or Galen…
Islam is anything but a “great civilization”. A hugely destructive force, squatted across history? That’d be far more accurate, just like saying the same of Chinese or Indian bureaucrats…
Kirk – they have survived for 14 centuries, and gone from a few people in Arabia to well over Billion people. This is what I mean by a great civilisation.
They may not have the accomplishments claimed for them – for example we have all seen media and academia types standing beside what are obviously Roman ruins and claiming they were built by the forces of Islam, but the Islamic way “works” – they have families, they run farms and business enterprises.
Do you see the “Woke” doing such things?
Kirk,
An uncharacteristically poor choice of words from Paul, I think. From a game theory perspective Islam is an enormously successful strategy which will almost certainly achieve its objective of infiltrating and taking over the West, especially as the Western governments show no interest in confronting it. None of this is remotely new, it was being warned about a century ago. (Posted before I saw Paul’s response.)
Watch as Africa’s population explodes, and Islam explodes across Africa. Islam is not a failed religion.
Yeah, I have my doubts about Islam’s long-term “success” at infiltrating the West.
Here’s the problem: Up until now, Islam has made its progress through some very sub-par populations. It’s easy to intellectually dominate the products of umpty-ump generations of cousin marriage, because the average IQ in those regions is around 85. They don’t ask too many questions, and they don’t pick up on the contradictions in your arguments.
Which is probably why the Arabs hate the Jews so much, come to think of it…
In any event, should Islam “conquer the West”, the end result won’t be what you’re thinking it might be. Instead, it will be like the snake that tried swallowing the alligator, in that the process of conquest and adaptation that they’ll have to make will render Islam essentially unrecognizable to its current set of adherents.
Smartest move for the Islamic theocracy? Stay the hell out of the West, because once you’ve got all those smartasses inside the house, asking questions, demanding answers, and competing with you inside the “House of Islam”? You’re gonna find it ain’t so easy, and you’re not going to like where you wind up with your low-IQ cousin-marrying kinfolk.
Do note the results of what happened when Christianity moved in on Northern Europe and “took over”. Remind me again how they changed everything… Or did they? I believe tomorrow is Wednesday, is it not? And, that we celebrate Christmas in a few months, which used to be a pagan holiday…?
Oh, yeah… The takeover will go ever so well. The triumphalist types fail to comprehend that such things are a two-way street, and that they’ll be changed at least as much as their targets will be.
Which I don’t think they’ll like one little bit.
Kirk,
I’m pleased to say we are in agreement. Islam dominating the West will almost certainly result in a hybrid. An interesting question though, is will it be a new Islam or an old one? Islam was not always swivel eyed fundamentalists. Anyway, once established, the white Muslims can declare the brown Muslims heretics and slaughter then in keeping with Islamic tradition. I do think that is at least a century off though, in the meanwhile they may we’ll bring down Western governments and cause a lot of damage.
I’ve noted before that Islam is largely a religion of places where you can sleep outside year round. They may decide to simply sack the more northern reaches and then abandon them.
“– they have signalled to Hamas that if it were to do the same again, there would be no moral consequences…”
– To paraphrase Kipling, “And this the Israelis know!” Their only “win” strategy in these circumstances is to eradicate Hamas, so there is no longer a Hamas to plan and execute further outrages, while laying-on such a severe “no end of a lesson” that other festering malcontents for generations-to-come will feel at least some trepidation about trying it themselves – and meanwhile playing the victim-card to the more rational world organizations that (at least somewhat) see the Israelis’ point. This last may seem to contradict BO’N’s article; but Israel has made some pretty effective strides in that direction already, by making two things very (and repeatedly) clear to all:
1) Being seen to urge, loudly and continuously, Palestinian civilians to flee Gaza City and move south of Wadi Gaza since well before the ground offensive began, and
2) Netanyahu’s frequent statement that no food, fuel, water OR CEASEFIRE NEGOTIATIONS will be available until ALL the hostages are freed.
This second condition is of course, a “can’t get there from here” of sorts – Hamas will NEVER free all the hostages, as this would do irreparable harm to both their negotiating position and their “Kill ALL the Jews” street cred’s among their jihadi brethren – which gives Israel a free hand in Gaza for the foreseeable future.
And Hezbollah? – this recent Strategypage article sums-up why Hezbollah is not eager to accede to its Iranian masters’ whims and march boldly forth against Israel in the North. Strategypage has also put-up several items in past months, pointing-out that Iran lacks a crucial lever that they used to brandish freely; being under sanctions, the Mullahcracy doesn’t have nearly as much money to throw-around to fledgling troublemakers as they used to; and Soleimani’s removal is still paying dividends throughout the region.
Actually, i heard that Islam is losing ground South of the Sahara. They have more sense than American academics, over there.
Meanwhile, the new law against “hate speech” in Estonia has been invoked by the police for the first time … against people who used the slogan “From the river to the sea” at a pro-Palestinian demo.
Roue le jour – what you call “swivel eyed fundamentalists” are often highly intelligent – and the rules they back are highly effective in increasing the power of Islam over time. They understand what they are doing – and people who try and “reinterpret” what Muhammed did and taught tend to lose over time, because the “reinterpretation” is so obviously false.
The word “fundamentalist” originally had nothing to do with opposing biological evolution (which is what people think the word means now) – it was originally a series of essays on Christianity in the early 1900s – some of these essays were actually written by scientists, including evolutionary biologists. The essays on “The Fundamentals of Christianity” (that is where the word “fundamentalist” comes from) were against the “Social Gospel” which argued, even back then, that Christianity was about more government spending and regulations – supposedly to help the poor.
The “fundamentalists” argued that even if the economic theories of Richard Ely (friend and ally of both “Teddy” Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) and other economist-theologians were correct (in reality their Modernist theories were-and-are total nonsense) they were not what Christianity was about – that Christianity was about certain “fundamental” doctrines such as individual survival after physical death (individual survival – not building a new society) and that if an person did not believe in these doctrines they were NOT a Christian – even if they had some very high position of authority. They were just an ANTI Christian in fancy robes sitting on a nicely carved chair – and busy talking nonsense about economics, politics, and-so-on.
Islam is also covered by “it is what it is” – and there are many highly intelligent people who believe in its doctrines in relation to gaining more and more power in the world over time.
Kirk – we both know that a lot of people in the West are as dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks, the sort of person who nods with approval at the absurd lies presented on the television screen by the Corporate media. So the idea that the Muslims will not win because we are more intelligent than them – is a dog that will not hunt. Also people can be highly intelligent – but also cowardly, as are so many Western leaders. Cowards do not tend to win this sort of struggle. “Let us put off any conflict” may be insane given the changing demographic situation in parts of Europe – but do not underestimate the desire for “a quiet life” and do not underestimate the capacity for self deception either – self destructive ideological positions.
For example, the first thing a German politician did when his daughter was murdered by an illegal immigrant was to give money to an organisation that brought in more of them – you see his primary concern was not to be thought “racist” or “Islamophoic”. This man was not someone of low I.Q. (quite the contrary) – he was just possessed (as so many people are) by a mixture of cowardice and self deception.
And there are a lot of people like that in the United States as well – “your daughter has just been murdered by an illegal from Mexico” getting the response of the father saying how much he loves tacos and how he respects people from all cultures.
And there are also people who think “if I speak up I will be PUNISHED for my words – and I will not achieve anything” and they may well be correct in the dying West.
Snorri – Christianity can indeed, sometimes, roll back Islam, but the sort of Christian leaders there are in parts of Africa are very different from the Archbishop Welby or Pope Francis types. The “mainstream” churches in the West are not in the hands of warriors-of-the-spirit. And the Western religious leaders are intellectually disarmed as arguments against Islam were dropped from theological training in the 1960s – the modern Western religious leaders (who went to seminary in the 1960s or later) do not have the knowledge to debate against Islam (they do not even clearly know what Islam teaches – and just parrot nonsense about “the religion of peace” that they have heard on television and at conferences) even if they had the will to oppose it.
As for Estonia – I believe that Estonia was the last E.U. “member state” to submit to European Union demands for “Hate Speech” laws – I am utterly against such laws.
That means that I support the right of evil people to chant “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” and “Gas the Jews”.
Either one supports Freedom of Speech or one does not – it should not be “free speech for me, but not for thee”.
@Snorri Godhi
Meanwhile, the new law against “hate speech” in Estonia has been invoked by the police for the first time … against people who used the slogan “From the river to the sea” at a pro-Palestinian demo.
Perhaps this instills a sense of schadenfreude in you. Not for me, it sends chills down my spine. I am reminded of that inscription on the US holocaust museum, originally written by German pastor Martin Niemöller in 1946:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
@Paul Marks,
Yeah, there are a lot of dumb Westerners. They are, however, still smarter than the average person residing in the regions Islam first grew, mainly because of the Hajnal line where they don’t marry cousins and marry late.
Islam is not going to conquer without inevitably and irretrievably being changed by the people it converts. The same syndrome that warped Christianity from what it was to what it is today will take place, as the religion is forced to deal with a different population base.
I’m not saying it isn’t going to result in “victory”, I’m saying that it’s going to result in there being a two-way street going on, one that is going to be entirely out of control by all concerned. For one thing, as Islam rises, there’s going to be a lengthy period where the “convert factor” of newly-converted people being a bit fanatical and purist about their new faith is going to weigh heavily in what happens. The devout Muslim of today is suddenly going to find themselves dealing with newly-converted who look at the rules of the game and say “The holy Koran says this about women, and look what you’re doing!!!”, which is where those older in the faith are going to find themselves in a bit of a bind, because they don’t follow the strict letter of the law as laid down by Mohammed. This is going to lead to a bunch of acrimony and violence in the first generations, which will then recoil throughout Islam. Same thing happened in Catholicism when it met pagan religion in Africa and South America… Similar things happen today, in the Mormon faith.
What’s going to happen, over the long haul? Unpredictable in the details, very predictable in what happens across the broad swathe of the events. You aren’t going to see Islam remaining unchanged by it all, and if and when the faith “conquers” what has been the most dynamic and changeable people on this planet, the Europeans?
All I can do is laugh at the prospect. Whatever comes out at the end, it won’t be the Islam we know today. For better or worse.
Paul:
I am afraid that it is not so clear-cut.
Apart from the case of shouting FIRE in a crowded theater, one can have libel laws — indeed without libel laws, it would be easy to suppress free speech.
All of this is beside the point, however.
The point is that the law against hate speech was forced by the EU, there is little that the Estonians could do about it; but at least the Estonian police are interpreting it literally, rather than as a pretext for political repression.
For now.
Fraser:
I appreciate that ‘perhaps’, but i do not understand why it sends chills down your spine. Much worse is happening in your native and your adoptive countries.
I would not describe my feelings as schadenfreude, but a combination of relief and irony.
* Relief that the police are interpreting the new law literally, rather than as an instrument of political repression.
If the courts differ, at least that will set a precedent if favor of free speech.
If not, i still take comfort that this is a rather extreme case (although not extreme on North-American campuses): a call for genocide in a public physical space.
After all, we prohibit obscenity in such spaces.
* Irony comes from the suspicion that this was not what the EU intended when they imposed “free speech” laws. Or at least, not what activists in favor of such laws intended.
@Snorri Godhi
Apart from the case of shouting FIRE in a crowded theater
This is an often used example, but its origins are very instructive. The words come from Oliver Wendell Holmes, justice on the US Supreme Court. The case is very instructive. It pertained to the appeal under the first amendment of a conviction under the Espionage Act of 1917, in which a group of men were campaigning against the entry of the US into the First World War. And it was the denial of this appeal that prompted Justice Holmes oft quoted words. Here the government was arresting and jailing people for challenging the government’s policy on whether to enter a war, perhaps THE most important decision a government can make — and they were thrown in jail for criticizing the government? In my opinion it is one of the worst decisions ever made by the USSC, and it is not at all the current judicial standard for rejecting a free speech claim.
But the important point is that here a seemingly obvious “well you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater” somehow is used to justifying criminalizing the act of arguing against government policy on some of the most important matters in the land? You give them an inch and they will take a thousand miles. That is why, or at least one of the main reasons, why we need to fight for the right of even the most loathsome people’s right to say what they want without risk of criminal charges. Because there are plenty of people who think what you and I say are loathsome, and I don’t look good in an orange jumpsuit.
As for Britain, mother of free speech and civil liberties, it is gone past any hope of return. It is extremely sad.
And TBH, I don’t understand what the big deal is. If you don’t like what someone is saying either argue against them or ignore then. Their words don’t harm you in any way.
But that is why seeing this sort of sends a shiver down my spine. Every. Single. Time.
, one can have libel laws — indeed without libel laws, it would be easy to suppress free speech.
All of this is beside the point, however.
The point is that the law against hate speech was forced by the EU, there is little that the Estonians could do about it; but at least the Estonian police are interpreting it literally, rather than as a pretext for political repression.
For now.
Sorry, I left some of @Snorri’s comment at the end of my previous one….
Snorri – it is “as simple as that”, as for “shouting fire in a crowded theatre” that was a false debating point by a dishonest Supreme Court Justice. If the Muslims and their Marxist allies (what a bizarre alliance) want to chant “Gas the Jews” then let us have this out in the open, let things be so obvious that even Western leaders (political and corporate) have to admit that the experiment of “Diversity, Inclusion, Equity” (they changed the order when they realised it spelled out DIE), is not working, and can-not-work.
Kirk – they do not tend to kill their own babies, Westerners do – indeed Westerners have a passion for it (as the voters in the United States showed yesterday), there is a certain evil logic in killing the babies of your enemies – but killing your own?
Muslims are NOT dumb compared to a lot of Westerners – and I am not entirely sure we are in any position to lecture them on morality either (Ohio – abortion up-to-birth is a “right”, and it will NOT stop at birth).
Why bother to conquer the West – why not wait till it finishes destroying itself?
Paul Marks,
We’re having the national conversation that Roe v. Wade precluded, and there is going to be a lot of back-and-forth. The constitutional amendment in Ohio is as much over-reach as Roe v. Wade was, and it will wind up being dealt with.
The real center is around “Abortion illegal as birth control” after the first trimester or so. Most agree with that, and even the majority of abortion rights types can live with that.
The raw problem here is that the culture of the country has become infested with all these “I wanna” types that can’t take responsibility for their actions, and who do not see consequence flowing from act. They just know they want that abortion, and be damned to the consequences.
It’ll bottom out in a few years. The Supreme Court never had any business making this decision; it should have been left up to legislatures in the first damn place, because it’s a political decision, not a judicial one.
It’s just bad luck that the courts came to their senses when they did, and that will have effects on how this will be handled going forward.
To my mind, aborting a viable fetus is infanticide, period. But, that’s not the opinion of a lot of people in this country, so… Yeah. Their voices will be heard, and the results will spread out from there. The Republicans were nuts to frame this whole thing the way they did; the triumphalist way they went about doing the laws after Roe v. Wade was overturned was just not conducive to their cause. What should have happened was them saying “OK, the Supreme Court has finally done the right thing, here… Let us get together and figure out what the best political compromise we could make would be…”
Instead, we got what they did, and the Ohio thing is a reaction. Which, in and of itself? Over-reaction; it’ll get overturned or redone with less disturbing results, once people see that it allows the excesses they don’t want.
Most people are fairly reasonable on this issue, outside the activist groups. Playing into the hands of the Democrats was never a good idea; they should have short-circuited the whole thing with some statesmanlike compromise. They did not, in most cases.
Kirk.
It is not “just” the industrial scale abortion in the West (and in Russia – if anyone really thinks Mr Putin is a conservative, I have a nice bridge to sell them) although I do not agree with you that the Republicans acted in an extreme way in Ohio and so on – that is media disinformation (as so often the media reverse the truth – the “extremists” were the people behind Proposition One), it is EVERYTHING.
The crushing levels of government spending, the state has taken over the roles of the family (families are dying in the West most children have no married fathers living with them now) and voluntary associations (religious and secular). The state is “all in all” now, it tries to do everything that Civil Society used to do – and it is making a mess of it (as everyone knew it would – no one really believed that having the state replace the family and Civil Society generally would have good consequences).
People who can not see that Western societies are collapsing are blind – and Muslims are NOT to blame, we are doing it to ourselves.
As for the monetary and financial system – it is a Credit Money insanity, this system is no longer capitalism (it is no longer about Real Savings – the actual sacrifice of consumption) – it is about Credit Money (money produced from NOTHING) and vast banks and Corporate Entities such as “BlackRock” (which controls ten TRILLION Dollars worth of shares).
This is not a real economy any more (no more than we have a real society any more) – it is insanity.
Real society and a real economy is dying in so many Western lands – and Islam is NOT to blame for this. I am no fan of Islam – but we are doing this to ourselves, Western society and Western economies are being destroyed by the policies that Westerners have adopted over a very long period of time.
The Goths of the 5th century were no more formidable than the tribes of centuries before – what had changed was Roman society.
Roman society was crushed by regulations and taxation long before the “barbarians” burned the towns and cities.
And modern Western society is actually in a WORSE state than Roman society was in the 5th century – most Roman citizens in the 5th century still had normal families, and they were farmers and artisans, the bureaucracy and the welfare dependents (although much higher than they had been in Roman society) were vastly LESS as a proportion of society than they are NOW in the West.
Yes the Roman coinage was debased (although Constantine did, partly, deal with that problem) – but they did not have the vast Credit Bubble madness that we have now.
And, again, most Roman children even in 400 AD knew who their father was – he lived with them and was married to their mother. And, again, even in 400 AD more Romans were being born than were dying – perhaps not in the big cities, but in the land as a whole.
What we are seeing in many Western lands now is slow-motion-genocide – and we are doing it to ourselves.
I’d argue that it’s not so much “doing it to ourselves” so much as it is a betrayal of the body politic by those who benefited the most from it. We’re experiencing a set of things that are imposed on us by our supposed “betters”, who we mistakenly put in charge of things and then listened to.
At the root, most normal people don’t believe the BS the academy pushes out. There’s more common sense out there than you would think, but the problem is, that common sense rarely gets exercised because the people in power don’t have it. Average Joe? He’d never decriminalize things, because he knows actual criminals and recognizes that they’re bad people, not “misguided youth”. Only the idiot elite could come up with that and run with it.
Which, when you think about it, is exactly what happened in Rome, to a large extent. The elites are what goes first; the fish rots from the head down.
So, tell me again… Why do we need these people? What purpose do they serve? Why do we listen to them? Why aren’t they run out of town on rails, tarred and feathered?
The day is coming when the collective West is going to have its Timisoara Moment with these types, and we won’t be the same ever after.
The progression of this crap since I was a kid is why I’m so suspicious and critical of any such thing as “elitism”. The one common factor I’ve observed about any of them, in any sphere? They look great from the outside, but from the inside? WTF? They’re idiots.
Case in point: US Navy SEAL teams. Vaunted warriors, superior beings… Yes? Then, riddle me this: How the hell did they manage to write an OPLAN and execute it that didn’t take into account the possible discovery by shepherds in the mountains of Afghanistan…? How many times has that been a problem, and they never learned the lesson, to account for it? I mean, you read the after-action accounts of the SAS Bravo Two-Zero team in Iraq back during Desert Storm, and what do you find? Shepherds compromising the observation team… Then, some fifteen-twenty years later, you find the same thing happening to SEALs in Operation Red Wings.
W. T. F? I still don’t get that; I was briefing security plans about local observation about that very problem when we were training guys up for Bosnia and Kosovo, and we were line Engineers, not “elite special operations forces”. Elite, my shiny white ass…
I still haven’t figured that one out. I mean, seriously? Did they spend no time actually observing these villages remotely? Have they never been around sheep, goats, and the humans responsible for them?
I have been thinking about my short debate with Paul and Fraser here, and i feel that i have not framed my replies to them properly.
I should have started by pointing out that i only reported on the application of the Estonian “”hate speech”” law, letting readers draw their own conclusions.
I could then go on to say that i believe that enacting such laws puts a country on a slippery slope to censoring anything inconvenient to the establishment.
However, it is important that, IFF such laws are enacted, THEN it is important for the police to enforce the letter of the law. That is because, if the police have discretion in the enforcing of “”hate speech”” laws, then they also have discretion about enforcing laws against rioting. The results, in London as in most American cities, are plain to see.
Paul wrote:
A very good point.
But equally, let something else be so obvious that even Western leaders have to admit it:
“”Hate speech”” laws are a double-edged sword. That is what the Estonian police made clear.
PS: The origin of the concept that you cannot shout “FIRE!” in a crowded theater is interesting, but it does not change the fact that you cannot shout “FIRE!” in a crowded theater.
Unless there is a fire, of course.