Month: August 2009

Does the Left Own Dissent?

Battles in the ‘culture war’ are often fought and sometimes won on linguistic ground. Linguistic hijacking is a tried-and-true tactic, one sometimes found on the Right, but more often on the Left: a term whose natural habitat is some neutral semantic space is hijacked and piloted toward a Left Coast semantic subspace.

An example is ‘dissent,' a word in which leftists fancy they have a proprietary interest.  It has two senses, one broad, the other narrow. In its broad usage, to dissent is to withhold assent, or else to differ in opinion. These are not the same, since if I withhold assent from your opinion about X, it does not follow that I hold a different opinion about X: I may suspend judgment by holding no opinion about X.

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Contra Adorno: A Preliminary Plea for Omphaloscopy

Adorno5

The Greek Omphalos  = the German Nabel  = navel. So omphaloscopy is navel-gazing, and an omphaloscopist is one who 'scopes out' his navel. But have there ever been practioners of meditation (Versenkung) who literally gazed at their navels or who came close to doing such a thing? A little gazing at my well-stocked library reveals that something like this practice is recommended in the Method of Holy Prayer and Attention, which tradition attributes to St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), abbot of the monastery of St. Mamas in Constantinople. Referring to the central passage of the Method, the anonymous author of The Jesus Prayer reports:

In order to pray, it is said, the disciple must close the door of his cell, place himself in a state of quiet, sit down, rest his chin against his chest, look towards the middle of his stomach, restrain his breathing, and make a mental effort to find the "place of the heart" while repeating all the time "the epiclesisof Jesus Christ." (p. 47)

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Roots of Leftist Viciousness in Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals

One reason that leftists are vicious is that they take to heart Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals  #13:

RULE 13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

Study Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals if you want to understand the tactics of the Obama administration.

David Horowitz will appear on the Glenn Beck show on 24 August to explain Alinsky's tactics.  See Alinsky, Beck, Satan, and Me.  Excerpt (emphasis added):

So Alinsky begins by telling readers what a radical is. He is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer. This is something that conservatives have a very hard time understanding. Conservatives in my experience are all together too decent, too civilized to match up adequately, at least in the initital stages of the battle, with their adversaries. They are too prone to give them the benefit of the doubt. Radicals can't really want to destroy a society that is democratic and liberal and has brought wealth and prosperity to so many. Oh yes they can. That is in fact the essence of what it means to be a radical — to be willing to destroy the values, structures and institutions that sustain the society we live in. Marx himself famously cited Alinsky's first rebel (using another of his names — Mephistopheles): "Everything that exists deserves to perish."

This is why ACORN activists for example have such contempt for the election process, why they are so willing to commit fraud. Because just as Lucifer didn't believe in God's kingdom, so the radicals who run ACORN don't believe in the democratic system. To them it's a fraud — an instrument of the ruling class, or as Alinsky prefers to call it, the Haves. If the electoral system doesn't serve all of us, but is only an instrument of the Haves then election fraud is justified, is a means of creating a system that serves the Have-Nots — social justice. Until conservatives begin to understand exactly how dishonest radicals are — dishonest in their core — it is going to be very hard to defend the system that is under attack. For radicals the noble end — creating a new heaven on earth — justifies any means. And if one actually believed it was possible to create heaven on earth who would not willingly destroy any system hitherto created by human beings?

 

The Race Card, the McCarthy Card, and ‘Death Panels’

There are two cards no leftist leaves home without: the race card and the McCarthy card.  The Henry Gates case was a particularly egregious recent example of the playing of the former.  For a recent example of an uncommonly  sleazy deployment of the latter, see Richard Cohen 's attack on Sarah Palin in which he mounts the lunatic thesis that "Palinism" is "an updated version of McCarthyism."

An excellent antidote to Cohen's delusional tripe is provided by Thomas Sowell in Whose Medical Decisions?  Excerpt:

As for a "death panel," no politician would ever use that phrase when trying to get a piece of legislation passed. "End of life" care under the "guidance" of "some independent group" sounds so much nicer– and these are the terms President Obama used in an interview with the New York Times back on April 14th.

He said, "the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out there." He added: "It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. That is why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance."

But when you select people like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel to give "independent" guidance, you have already chosen a policy through your choice of advisors, who simply provide political cover. The net result can be exactly the same as if those providing that guidance were openly called "death panels."

Timothy Treadwell and Nature Idolatry

In the weight room one day I made the acquaintance of a man from Alaska.  I steered the conversation onto Chris McCandless and others of the wild and crazy crew who seek Something More in the last American frontier. My interlocutor was not familiar with the McCandless story, but he reminded me of the case of Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. This piece from Outside magazine tells the tale. And here is his final letter.

In the Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the ummistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or the crotch-grabbing one man melting pot, or some other 'icon.'

Addenda, 19 August: 

1. Theists need to consider whether they are worshipping the true God or a theological fabrication.  There is the almost irresistible tendency to identify God with one's conception of God.  But the two cannot be the same.  There are various conceptions of God, some better than others; but God is obviously not a conception.  It is easy to succumb to the worship of a product of  the human mind, whether it be an individual product, or a collective product such as the conception authorized by a particular cult or church.

2.  The knee-jerk use of 'icon' throughout the media is a good indicator of contemporary idolatry.  What we need is a new iconoclasm.  Memo to self: develop this 'stub.'

The ACLU on the Second Amendment

Aclu_tshirt-p235462473170398647q6xn_400 The following is verbatim from the ACLU website:

The Second Amendment provides: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

ACLU POSITION
Given the reference to "a well regulated Militia" and "the security of a free State," the ACLU has long taken the position that the Second Amendment protects a collective right rather than an individual right. For seven decades, the Supreme Court's 1939 decision in United States v. Miller was widely understood to have endorsed that view.

The Supreme Court has now ruled otherwise. In striking down Washington D.C.'s handgun ban by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in D.C. v. Heller held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms, whether or not associated with a state militia.

The ACLU disagrees with the Supreme Court's conclusion about the nature of the right protected by the Second Amendment. We do not, however, take a position on gun control itself. In our view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue.

Two main points. First, the concluding sentence of the quotation, which I have bolded, is so preposterous as to take the breath away. Whether or not there is a right to keep and bear arms is plainly a civil liberties issue.  I would have thought that this would require no argument. Apparently I was wrong: liberals of the ACLU stripe are so preternaturally stupid as to be blind to the obvious.  You will see this if you understand what a civil liberty is.  Here are some definitions:

  • one's freedom to exercise one's rights as guaranteed under the laws of the country
  • fundamental individual right protected by law and expressed as immunity from unwarranted governmental interference
    wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
  • Civil liberties are freedoms that protect an individual from the government of the nation in which they reside. Civil liberties set limits for government so that it cannot abuse its power and interfere unduly with the lives of its citizens.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_liberty

    Even if you think of the right to keep and bear arms as a collective right — a right an individual has in virtue of belonging to a militia– it is still a civil liberty by the first and third definitions.

    But, and here is my second point, one cannot correctly infer that the right in question is a collective right from the wording of the Second Amendment.  Carefully read the Second Amendment, quoted above, and note that the subordinate clause provides a reason, which is not the same as the only reason, for the right in question not to be infringed.  One cannot therefore validly infer from the formulation of the Second Amendment that it refers only to a collective right.  ""A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" gives one reason for the protection of gun rights.  This is consistent with there being other reasons.  Three other reasons come readily to mind.  There  is the need for the means of self-defense of oneself and one's family from the criminal element.  There is the need for the means of defense against wild animals. (Would you backpack in grizzly country without any protection?  You might end up bear scat like the benighted Timothy Treadwell.)   And there is the need for the means of defense against a usurpatious government.

    • Five Serious Uses of Argument

    Even among calm and reasonable people, few are persuaded by argument, even when it satisfies the canons of logic. Changes of view under dialectical pressure are seldom seen. Most just dig in and fortify their defenses. This raises questions about the utility of argument, debate, and discussion. Call me sanguine, call me naive – but I believe in their utility. Herewith, a preliminary catalog of the uses of argument.

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    Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche

    What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite? That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions — say a different black-eyed virgin every night as in popular Islam's depiction of paradise — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.

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    Master Desire and Aversion

    It is a curious fact that a man who has no time for his own wife easily finds time for the wife of another. Not valuing what he has, he desires what he does not have, even though at some level he understands that, were he to take possession of what he now merely desires, the pattern would repeat itself: he would again desire that which he does not possess over that which he does possess. He should learn to appreciate what he has.

    The Buddhists have a saying, "Conquer desire and aversion." But this goes too far: desire and aversion are not to be conquered or extirpated so much as chastened and channeled. They are to be mastered. Without self-mastery, the highest mastery, there can be no true happiness.

    On Reverence

    In The Weblog Handbook (Perseus Publishing 2002), Rebecca Blood writes:

    If you asked me what the weblog community needs, I would answer, stronger ties among webloggers from various clusters, more independent thinkers, and more irreverence. Much, much more irreverence. Everyone seems to take themselves so seriously. (p. 164)

    This passage demonstrates a pretty thorough misunderstanding of the concept of reverence. Blood appears to be confusing reverence with self-importance. Reverence, however, is more like the opposite of self-importance. Reverence is an attitude of honor, respect, devotion, deference toward a sufficiently lofty object distinct from one’s surface self. What Kant calls the moral law is an appropriate object of reverence. Like the starry skies above me, the moral law within me stands apart from, and superordinate to, my lower self. The divine, and anything or anyone sufficiently close to the divine, are also appropriate objects of reverence.

    The truth is an appropriate object of reverence. A necessary condition of being a good journalist, for example, is reverence for the truth. A good journalist aims to establish the facts. Facts, by definition, are what they are regardless of what anyone believes them to be or desires them to be. The reverence appropriate to the competent and honest journalist has nothing to do with self-importance.

    Crude Conservatives and Harsh Language

    It is no surprise to find crude liberals. After all, liberals are big on toleration, including toleration of every manner of bad behavior. Indeed, some of them are so tolerant that they tolerate those with no respect for the principle of toleration. This is part of the explanation of why they tend to be soft on terrorism. And, since their toleration extends to the toleration of illogical thinking, they cannot see that to tolerate everything is to tolerate the rejection of the principle of toleration.

    It is more of a surprise to find crude conservatives. Tucker Carlson on C-Span a while back used the ‘F’ word. Using it, he detracted from an otherwise excellent presentation, cheapening it, but also removing some of the force from a word that ought to be reserved for very special occasions. One occasionally meets people who need to be blasted with the strongest language one can muster, just as there are some folks who need shootin’ — as a Clint Eastwood character might put it. But just as you should never shoot a man who doesn’t absolutely need shootin’, you should never verbally blast a man who doesn’t absolutely need blastin’. And just as you can’t properly shoot a man without the right caliber of ammo, you can’t properly deliver a proper verbal blast if formerly strong words have been weakened by overuse.

    So there are two reasons to avoid the overuse of harsh language. One is that it demeans its users, cheapens debate, and makes the world uglier than it already is. The second reason is that the overuse of harsh language, while coarsening its users and polluting the social atmosphere, drains these words of the punch they need to do their job on the occasions when it is appropriate to use them.