I'm pretty good with the invective, but I can't hold a candle to Kurt Schlichter. Here is another taste:
Yes, the Democrats do have a major advantage in the fact that the Republican establishment, especially in Congress, is largely a gaggle of drooling idiots. From Sissy Sasse to Foamy Marco, these fussy failures seem determined to demoralize the base with their tedious moralizing about how “We are better than that” and “Oh, well I never.” The GOP would have no problem if these dorks had just one tenth the will to win as they do the will to posture for the benefit of a liberal media that hates them and that will disembowel them the moment they stop being useful idiots and become merely idiots.
To say that invective has no place in political discourse would be like saying that shooting has no place in warfare.
Take Hillary. She is a greedy, crooked, slanderous, race-baiting liar. You cannot engage a miserable specimen like this on the plane of reason. You have to punch back with mockery, derision, and invective. And throw in a little contumely for good measure.
You don't think she is a slanderous, race-baiting, liar? See here:
Hillary Clinton on Thursday slammed the Trump administration for promoting "racist and white supremacist" views while praising her "dear friend" Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) for being one of the leading opposition voices.
White supremacist? Maxine Waters? Birds of a feather flock together.
You need to tell us what a white supremacist is, Hillary, and define 'racist' while you are at it. Put up or STFU.
I've been thinking about the problem of interpreting "no religious test" in light of your post. It's actually a very difficult problem! I'm almost convinced the correct response is that, unfortunately, if the Constitution is interpreted correctly then fundamentalist Muslims do indeed have the right to hold public office–given the most natural and reasonable interpretation of word meanings and even taking into account the likely intentions of the founding fathers, the history of legal interpretation, etc. It's very hard to get around this. Maybe rather than saying that the Constitution is not a suicide pact on any sane interpretation, we have to say that a sane person would reject both suicide pacts and some parts of the US Constitution.
I grant that it is a very difficult problem, and I am aware that few will be convinced by what I wrote earlier. Ask anybody what Islam is and he will tell you that it is a religion. And then, given that
. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.(Article VI)
it seems to follow via some uncontroversial auxiliary premises that no Muslim shall be barred from running for office simply because he is a Muslim.
But of course among those Muslims are those who have no intention of assimilating and accepting our values but instead seek to impose Sharia on us thereby rejecting our values and principles and subverting our system of government.
So the question I would put to my fellow citizens is: Are you comfortable with an interpretation of the Constitution that allows for its elimination and the values and principles it enshrines?
I am not.
There are those who will say: let anyone immigrate from anywhere and then let the people who have immigrated decide what they want. They call that democracy, and they are all for it. The people are the residents within certain geographical borders, and residency constitutes citizenship. If the residents want blasphemy laws, then we shall have blasphemy laws.
You point out that Islam is not just a religion but also a political ideology. But does that really help? It still is a religion, and if the Constitution forbids any "religious test", without ever saying anything about the scope of "religion", the most natural interpretation is that even religions that double as political ideologies–most religions, really–are subject to the "no religious test" rule. You say that we could declare Islam an inadmissible religion, but then wouldn't effectively mean that the Constitution is self-contradictory? On the one hand, there is to be freedom of religion and no religious test–the subject here being surely just religion in general. On the other hand, only some religions are protected by the "no religious test" rule, and for other religions there can be a religious test after all. That seems incoherent, no?
Islam is a religion, but not a religion in the sense in which Hinduism, Buddhism Judaism, and Christianity are religions. Will you grant me that? Or must I argue it out?
There is no contradiction or incoherence such as you imagine. I take it you find no incoherence in what the logic books call exceptive propositions. For example, "All citizens of the United States are guaranteed freedom of religion except those whose religions are incompatible with the values and principles of the American founding." The following propositions are logically consistent. (1) The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and disallows religious tests. (2) The Constitution guarantees these things subject to the proviso that the religion in question is compatible with the principles of the American founding.
Now the Constitution does not contain these formulations. But we will agree that the document is subject to interpretation. My claim is that it is most reasonable interpreted along the lines I have suggested.
As for incoherence, I should think that your account is more justly charged with it. A constitution that allows for its own subversion is incoherent if not strictly self-contradictory in the logical sense. The provisions of such a constitution do not cohere with its own continued existence.
Actually I don't know that the idea of a church/state or religion/politics distinction will make sense if we allow that some religions are also political ideologies. If the two can be separated, wouldn't that mean that the religions that are also political must be either banned or else somehow reformulated so that they're only religious? Otherwise, the effect would be to prevent the normal or traditional practice of those religions–since normally or by their nature they'd function as political entities. But then wouldn't that be incompatible with the ideal of freedom of religion? I don't know. Just some rambling thoughts. The issue seems very confusing. The US Constitution was never meant to apply to this bizarre multicultural situation that's been induced.
But why on earth would you want the normal or traditional practice of (radical) Islam in the U. S. , Canada, France, the West generally? I know you don't want that.
The Founders figured something out. They figured out that a modicum of civil peace can be had if government is kept limited in scope and kept separate from religion.
Freedom of religion, like freedom of speech, and like toleration, has limits. As you know, Islam does not recognize freedom of religion. You either convert, accept dhimmitude, or are put to the sword. It is therefore entirely reasonable to place restrictions on freedom of religion and ban politically subversive religions.
A commitment to freedom of religion becomes incoherent and suicidal when it is taken to imply freedom for all religions including those that reject freedom of religion. Similarly for freedom of speech and toleration. A sane toleration must be intolerant of the intolerant.
Over the past year, facts have emerged that suggest there was a plot by high-ranking FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials in the Obama administration, acting under color of law, to exonerate Hillary Clinton of federal crimes and then, if she lost the election, to frame Donald Trump and his campaign for colluding with Russia to steal the presidency. This conduct was not based on mere bias, as has been widely claimed, but rather on deeply felt animus toward Trump and his agenda.
In the course of this plot, FBI Director James Comey, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI Deputy Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, Strzok’s paramour and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, FBI General Counsel James Baker, and DOJ senior official Bruce Ohr—perhaps among others—compromised federal law enforcement to such an extent that the American public is losing trust. A recent CBS News poll finds 48 percent of Americans believe that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia collusion probe is “politically motivated,” a stunning conclusion. And 63 percent of polled voters in a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll believe that the FBI withheld vital information from Congress about the Clinton and Russia collusion investigations.
Is 'politicization' the right word? Can one politicize what is already political by its very nature? (The FBI is part of the government; the government is a political entity; ergo, the FBI is political and essentially so; one cannot politicize, i.e., make political, what cannot exist except as political. Might it not be better to say that Comey, McCabe, and the gang are using the FBI for partisan purposes?
I mean: you wouldn't want to say that when functioning properly and in accordance with the Constitution the government and its branches and bureaus is apolitical, would you?
You are free to dismiss these questions as the ruminations of a pedant.
One mile from where I live in the French city of Lyon, there is an Islamicized neighborhood where I recently bought this (elegantly printed and bound) book in French.
Four pages (46-49) are devoted to how you should urinate and defecate if you are an observant Muslim. And a very elaborate affair it is. Hold your penis with your left hand. Remember that it is forbidden to wipe your bottom with fewer than three stones or with a bone. The description of these 7th century customs from Arabia are piously reprinted in the textbook supposedly read by serious 20th century French-speaking Muslims.
Are we instructed as to the proper disposal of the three soiled stones? Why wouldn't the bone of an infidel be an appropriate instrument of anal cleansing?
But since I am not a Muslim, I was more interested in the final chapters. Chapter XVI is devoted to jihad (the real thing, not “internal spiritual struggle”) and chapter XVII to the freeing of slaves. For five dollars infidel readers can thus become more knowledgeable about what may await them.
You learn all there is to know about the war booty, the dhimma and such matters. Also please note the Prophet said that if you want to free a slave, it is advisable to do this during a solar eclipse.
You might imagine that this is an edition of an old treatise penned in the fifteenth century.
No. Time has stood still.
It is a compendium of fiqh written by an Egyptian scholar born in 1954 (not in 1054 or 1454), a former student of al-Azhar. The French translation was published in 2011 by The International Islamic Publishing House, Riyadh.
Yes, Islam is a religion. It is also, intrinsically, “political Islam”. Since when? Since the Hegira.
The main thing is that Islam is a violent, oppressive, totalitarian system inimical to the values and traditions of the West, one which has the support of destructive leftists. It may be too late for Europe and the U. K., but we here in the USA still have a fighting chance of beating back the barbarians.
Leftists evince a pronounced libertine 'wobble' en rapport as they are with sexual perversions and 'alternative lifestyles' and are therefore in danger of 'losing their heads' should the Sharia boys come to power. So their collusion with the latter is a curious thing to behold.
I am coming to the view that the qualifier 'radical' in 'radical Islam' is redundant: True Islam is radical by its very nature. Could there be such a person as a moderate Nazi? I think not. Is 'moderate Muslim' in the same logical boat, a phrase that perhaps applies only to Zuhdi Jasser and a few others?
. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
Does it follow that the U. S. Constitution should be so interpreted as to allow a Muslim citizen who supports sharia (Islamic law) to run for public office? No! For the same Constitution, in its First Amendment, enjoins a salutary separation of church/synagogue/mosque and state, though not in those words. Sharia and the values and principles enshrined in the founding documents are incompatible. On no sane interpretation is our great Constitution a suicide pact.
It is important to realize that Islam is as much an anti-Enlightenment political ideology as it is a religion. Our Enlightenment founders must be rolling around in their graves at the very suggestion that sharia-subscribing Muslims are eligible for the presidency and other public offices.
Many assume that no restriction may be placed on admissible religions for the purposes of the implementation of Article VI. I deny it. A religion that requires the subverting of the U. S. Constitution is not an admissible religion when it comes to applying the "no religious Test" provision. One could argue that on a sane interpretation of the Constitution, Islam, though a religion, is not an admissible religion where an admissible religion is one that does not contain core doctrines which, if implemented, would subvert the Constitution.
Or one might argue that Islam is not a religion at all. Damn near anything can and will be called a religion by somebody. Some say with a straight face that leftism is a religion, others that Communism is a religion. Neither is a religion on any adequate definition of 'religion.' I have heard it said that atheism is a religion. Surely it isn't. Is a heresy of a genuine religion itself a religion? Arguably not. Hillaire Belloc and others have maintained that Islam is a Christian heresy. Or one could argue that Islam, or perhaps radical Islam, is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion. If an X masquerades as a Y, then the X is not a Y. How to define religion is a hotly contested issue in the philosophy of religion.
The point here is that "religious" in ". . . no religious Test shall ever be required" is subject to interpretation. We are under no obligation to give it a latitudinarian reading that allows in a destructive ideology incompatible with our values and principles.
You say you're for it? Would you still be for it if I could show you that it is virtually certain that you will end up among the centrally planned and not among the central planners?
I have very much appreciated the apt title that you bestowed yesterday on the present pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, “Bergoglio the Benighted,” who is indeed the essence of a “leftist knucklehead.” What intrigues and angers me is the absence of any real opposition within the Church to this caudillo and the gang around him. The moral and cultural rot in the Church has indeed advanced very far.
The huge historical implications of Bergoglio’s nefarious machinations, all intensifiers and accelerators of this rot, are succinctly elucidated in an essay by Roberto Pertrici, an historian at the University of Bergamo, which appears today on Sandro Magister’s blog “Settimo Cielo,” in which Perticci argues that “[il] pontificato di Francesco, credo che si possa ragionevolmente sostenere che esso segna il tramonto di quell’imponente realtà storica definibile come ‘cattolicesimo romano.’” I think that the article is well worth reading, either in Italian or in the English translation that is available. One more sign that we are in big trouble in the West.
Roberto Petrici's essay "The End of Roman Catholicism?" is available in English here. Read it, ragazzi.
William Kilpatrick is the best writer at Crisis Magazine. Because he invariably talks sense, I have linked to his work on numerous occasions. It is important that he remain a writer there given that squishy liberal shallow-pates are 'over-represented' among Catholics and have been for a good 60 years, with the current pope, Bergoglio the Benighted, leading the bunch. The beauty of blog is that I can be appropriately disrespectful of the leftist knucklehead where Kilpatrick cannot.
One of the misleading assumptions of our times is that fear is born of ignorance. Its corollary is the belief that increased education or increased familiarity with the “other” will banish fear. For example, after the Italian election results, Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, said that the Church would have to continue its “work of education.”
But, in fact, Italians along with Germans, French, Brits, Dutch, and so on have been drenched for decades in the kind of education that Cardinal Parolin favors. A large part of the curriculum in European schools is devoted to teaching youngsters to respect different races and cultures. Indeed, many European students are given the distinct impression that other cultures are morally superior to their own.
[. . .]
Nice sentiments. But it doesn’t always work that way. For example, the more that Jews in Germany became familiar with the Nazis and their ideology, the more they properly feared them. Likewise, Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs were right to fear the communist takeover of Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, many Europeans and Americans were not fearful enough about the twin threats posed by Nazism and communism. Their naiveté and lack of prudent fear was a major factor in enabling first the Nazis and then the communists to enslave half of Europe.
The same might be said of the pope’s almost complete lack of rational, prudential fear. By encouraging people not to be fearful of a real danger, the pope only adds to the danger. For example, attacks on European Jews have risen sharply in recent years. Jews in Europe are fearful once again—not because of some irrational prejudice on their part, but because of the rise of an ideology every bit as anti-Semitic as that fostered by the Nazis.
I'll say it again. Xenophobia is an irrational fear of foreigners and things foreign. But not all fear is irrational. If you refuse to make these simple distinctions, then you are being willfully stupid and deserve moral condemnation. It is morally wrong to refuse to use your intellect, especially if you consider it to be God-given.
In light of that crime spike London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has laid down the law. “No excuses,” he declared the other day on Twitter. “There is never a reason to carry a knife. Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full force of the law.”
Britain imposes strict gun control. It also imposes absurdly strict knife control. The government forbids carrying a knife in public “without good reason, unless it has a folding blade with a cutting edge 3 inches long or less.”
Take note: Lock-back knives — the kind in which the blade locks in the open position, to prevent accidental folding while the knife is being held, and thus lacerated fingers — are verboten no matter the blade length. Lock-backs “can include multi-tool knives — tools that also contain other devices such as a screwdriver or can opener.” And a “good reason” for carrying a knife includes using the knife for work, or perhaps “historical reenactment or religious purposes.” Not, say, self-defense, or just because a knife sometimes comes in handy.
I have long subscribed to Kant's famous meta-ethical principle according to which our moral obligations cannot outrun our abilities. 'Ought' implies 'can.' If I am under a moral obligation to do X, then I must be able to do X. We are concerned here with moral not legal oughts, and we understand 'ought' in accordance with the principle that if one morally ought to do X, then one is morally obliged/obligated to do X.
Roughly, if you ought to do something, then it must be possible for you to do it, not just logically, and not just nomologically; it must be possible for you to do it given your actual abilities at a particular time and in definite circumstances. With a bit more precision:
OC. Necessarily, if agent A ought to do X at time t in circumstances C, then A is able to do X at t and in C.
So if I ought to come to your aid, then I am able to do so. By contraposition, if I am unable to come to your aid, then it is not the case that I ought to, and I am not subject to moral censure if I fail to.
Note the logical difference between 'It is not the case that A ought to do X' and 'A ought not to do X.' To confuse those two would be to commit an operator shift fallacy by importing the negation operator into the negatum. So the contrapositive of 'ought' implies 'can' is not 'cannot' implies 'ought not,' but 'cannot' implies 'not ought.' Better still: 'not can' implies 'not ought.'
Now suppose I promise to drive you to the airport at six in the morning. So promising, I morally obligate myself to so doing, i.e., I ought to drive you to the airport at six. It follows by (OC) that I can drive you to the airport in a very concrete sense of 'can,': I know how to drive; I know how to get to the airport; I have access to a car, no one is preventing me from driving, etc. Obviously, a carjacking would absolve me of my moral obligation.
My ability in this concrete and specific sense is a necessary condition of my being morally obligated to drive you to the airport.
Putative Counterexample
Suppose that the night before the airport run I get drunk, sleep through the alarm, wake up late and hungover, and forget to fill up the gas tank in my vehicle. As a result we run out of gas and you miss your flight. I am unable to deliver on my promise, and do what the promise obligated me to do, but it seems that I am nonetheless morally responsible and indeed open to moral censure. In this case it seems that 'not can'' does not imply 'not ought.' It seems that my inability to get you to the airport on time does not absolve me of my moral obligation to perform than very action. For I did something blameworthy by getting drunk the night before.
I am not impressed by counterexamples of this sort. Touching only the letter, but not the spirit of Kant's great principle, they merely invite a reformulation thereof. To wit,
OC*. Necessarily, if agent A ought to do X at time t in circumstances C, then A is able to do X at t and in C subject to the proviso that around t and in C A has not done anything to impair his abilities or factors contributing to his abilities.
The entire vocabulary of illegal immigration has become Orwellian. Once descriptive nouns and adjectives such as “alien” and “illegal” have melted into “undocumented” and “immigrant” and then into just “migrant,” ostensibly to mask the reality of both legal status and the fact that migrants go in one direction — and there is an existential difference between immigrants and emigrants.
Excellent point about 'migrant.' The term blurs the distinction between those who emigrate and those who immigrate as if there is no difference. But as Hanson says, the difference is "existential." What could that mean? Well, no emigrants but some immigrants pose an existential threat to us, not so much to our physical existence, though I wouldn't point this out to the parents of Kate Steinle, but to our way of life, which is more important.
Here, then, is another example of what mendacious scum 'liberals' or 'progressives' are. Instead of addressing the issues in an honest and forthright way, they commit acts of linguistic hijacking.
Remember: he who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate.
Once someone makes a decision to enter a country illegally — his first decision as an incoming alien — and thus breaks a U.S. law with impunity, then most subsequent decisions are naturally shaped by the idea of exemption. Zealots argue that entering the U.S. illegally is merely a civil infraction. But the IRS in 2017 identified some 1.2 million identity-theft cases, in which illegal aliens had employed illegitimate or inconsistent social-security numbers to file tax returns — and implicitly thereby cause innumerable problems for the U.S. tax system.
Professor Hanson should have pointed out that illegal immigrants are subject to criminal penalties. Improper entry comes under the criminal code. While improper entry is a crime, unlawful presence is not a crime. One can be unlawfully present in the U. S. without having entered improperly, and thus without having committed a crime.
If a foreign national enters the country on a valid travel or work visa, but overstays his visa, failing to exit before the expiration date, then he is in violation of federal immigration law. But this comes under the civil code, not the criminal code. Such a person is subject to civil penalties such as deportation.
So there are two main ways for an alien to be illegal. He can be illegal in virtue of violating the criminal code or illegal in virtue of violating the civil code.
Those who oppose strict enforcement of national borders show their contempt for the rule of law and their willingness to tolerate criminal behavior, not just illegal behavior.
So much of the discussion of illegal immigration is predicated not just on fantasy, but on Soviet-style censorship, and not just of speech, but of our very thoughts. Taboo are suggestions that illegal immigration could be a prime reason that California now has the highest basket of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation; the highest number of welfare recipients (one of three in the United States), with a fifth of the state living below the poverty level; and now a fourth of all hospital admittances found to be suffering from diabetes or prediabetes; or that national rankings of infrastructure quality place the state nearly last in the country.
Talk of race has approached something like Lewis Carol’s Through the Looking Glass, in which everything is upside down. “La Raza” — until recently the nomenclature of the nation’s largest Hispanic advocacy organization — has supposedly nothing to do with race, while others who would never have an odious desire to use its odious English equivalent, “The Race,” are deemed racists for their objections to La Raza terminology.
Residency is deliberately conflated with citizenship, as if the two are legally and morally equivalent. But again, nowhere else in the world is this true, and certainly not in Mexico. I have lived abroad for over two years. As a guest in Athens, I followed Greek politics closely. I paid steep Greek sales taxes and assorted fees and tariffs as a legal resident alien. But at no time did I imagine that taxes or my physical presence as a lawful guest on Greek soil allowed me to interfere with the politics of my host, much less to issue demands on Athens, or to give me de facto the same legal rights as Greek citizens. As a legal alien, I surely did not think I could vote. I knew better than to tell Greeks that their country was not to my taste. And I knew fellow aliens who overstayed visas, worked without permits, and did not register as foreign residents. At least before the days of the latest incarnations of the European Union, the resulting fines were stiff, and expulsions were uncontested.
Once again one sees what utter misological filth these leftists are. They will engage in any kind of obfuscation to win while we waste time being polite.
I have made the point recently that the constant yapping about 'democracy' aids and abets the conflation of residency with citizenship. Leftists just love that word. When you hear it from their mouths know that nasty obfuscation and sophistry is on the way.
When Jerry Brown or Nancy Pelosi lectures the state on its illiberality, or on the immigration sins of Donald Trump, or the advantages of nullification and a sanctuary state, we assume that these are just the penultimate chest poundings and virtue signals of rich septuagenarians about to go into apartheid retirements in Napa or Grass Valley.
In that context, all of their legacies above make perfect sense.
Indeed, they do. These ancient knuckleheads will depart the scene with their virtue intact while leaving behind a crap hole for others to live in. I can't bring myself to believe that these two clowns are animated by evil intentions; the consequences of their folly, however, are evil in excelsis. Pelosi in particular is not so much evil as just plain stupid. It says a lot about the electorate that she should have had so much power for so long.
