{"id":7357,"date":"2015-02-22T04:13:26","date_gmt":"2015-02-22T04:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/02\/22\/citizens-lynching-citizens-2\/"},"modified":"2015-02-22T04:13:26","modified_gmt":"2015-02-22T04:13:26","slug":"citizens-lynching-citizens-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/02\/22\/citizens-lynching-citizens-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Citizens Lynching Citizens"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine a history teacher who tells his students that in the American South, as late as the 1960s, certain citizens lynched certain other citizens.  Would you say that the teacher had omitted something of great importance for understanding why these lynchings occurred?  Yes you would.  You would point out that the lynchings were of blacks<\/em> by whites<\/em>, and that a good part of the motivation for their unspeakable crimes was sheer racial animus.  In the case of these crimes, the races of the perpetrators and of their victims are facts relevant to understanding the crimes.  Just to describe the lynchings accurately one has to mention race, let alone to explain them. <\/span><\/p>\n

I hope no one will disagree with me on this.<\/span><\/p>\n

Or consider the case of a history teacher who reports that in Germany, 1933-1945, certain German citizens harassed, tortured, enslaved, and executed other German citizens.  That is true, of course, but it leaves out the fact that the perpetrators were Nazis and (most of) the victims Jews.  Those additional facts must be reported for the situation to be properly described, let alone explained.  Not only that, the Nazis were acting from<\/em> Nazi ideology and the Jew were killed for<\/em> being Jews.  <\/span><\/p>\n

According to recent reports, some Muslim jihadis<\/em> beheaded some Egyptian Coptic Christians on a Libyan beach. Now beheading is not lynching.  And religion is not the same as race. But just as race is relevant in the lynching case, religion is relevant in the beheading case.  That the perpetrators of the beheadings were Muslims and the victims Christians enters into both an adequate description and an adequate explanation of the evil deeds of the former.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is especially so since  the Muslims were acting from<\/em> Islamic beliefs and the Christians were killed for<\/em> their Christian beliefs.  It was not as if some merely nominal Muslims killed some merely nominal Christians in a dispute over the ownership of some donkeys.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bear in mind my distinction between a 'sociological' X and a 'doctrinal' X.<\/span><\/p>\n

What did Barack Obama say about this?  He said<\/a>: \u201cNo religion is responsible for terrorism \u2014 people are responsible for violence and terrorism."<\/span><\/p>\n

Now that is a mendacious thing to say. Obama knows that the behavior of people is influenced by their beliefs.  For example, he knows that part of the explanation of the lynchings of blacks by whites is that the white perpetrators held racists beliefs that justified (in their own minds) their horrendous behavior.  And of course he knows, mutatis mutandis<\/em>, the same about the beheading case.  <\/span><\/p>\n

He knows that he is engaging in a vicious abstraction when he sunders people and their beliefs in such a way as to imply that those beliefs have no influence on their actions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why then is Obama so dishonest?  Part of the explanation is that he just does not care about truth.  (That is a mark of the bullshitter as Harry Frankfurt has pointed out.) Truth, after all, is not a leftist value, except insofar as it can be invoked to forward the leftist agenda.  It is the 'progressive' agenda that counts, first, and the narrative that justifies the agenda, second.  (Karl Marx, 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it."  Truth doesn't come into it since a narrative is just a story and a story needn't be true to mobilize people to implement an agenda.  <\/span><\/p>\n

There's more to it than that, but that's enough for now.  This is a blog and brevity is the soul of blog as some wit once observed.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is to be done?  Well, every decent person must do what he or she can to combat the lying scumbags of the Left.  It is a noble fight, and may also be, shall we say, conducive unto your further existence in the style to which you have become accustomed.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Another Double Standard<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>The Moral Idiocy of Barack Obama<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Bernard Lewis, "Jihad versus Crusade"<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>What ISIS Really Wants<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>The Crusades Were Defensive Wars<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imagine a history teacher who tells his students that in the American South, as late as the 1960s, certain citizens lynched certain other citizens.  Would you say that the teacher had omitted something of great importance for understanding why these lynchings occurred?  Yes you would.  You would point out that the lynchings were of blacks … Continue reading “Citizens Lynching Citizens”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119,163,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-islamism","category-leftism-and-political-correctness","category-race"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}