When Lady Gaga spoke at a rally in support of repealing the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy towards gays in the military, she said: “Our new law is called ‘If you don’t like it, go home!’” That kind of speech is described as a defense of tolerance. Today the New York Times narrates the case of a University of Nebraska astronomer who was denied a position at the University of Kentucky because he was “potentially evangelical.” The department voted to deny him the position because it would look bad for the university if it hired a religious nut. Both incidents highlight the new normal, whatever that is.
… the smoking gun is an e-mail dated Sept. 21, 2007, from a department staff member, Sally A. Shafer, to Dr. Cavagnero and another colleague. Ms. Shafer wrote that she did an Internet search on Dr. Gaskell and found links to his notes for a lecture that explores, among other topics, how the Bible could relate to contemporary astronomy.
Advertisement“Clearly this man is complex and likely fascinating to talk with,” Ms. Shafer wrote, “but potentially evangelical. If we hire him, we should expect similar content to be posted on or directly linked from the department Web site.”
Just what is inappropriate in modern society is a matter of intense debate. Some people say that anything goes. Recently, Ann Althouse quoted Justice Scalia in connection with a case involving incest between a Columbia professor and Huffington Post blogger. She argued that morals legislation may effectively be dead. Scalia said where once there was a belief “that certain forms of sexual behavior are ‘immoral and unacceptable’… the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity,” those views were in his view increasingly untenable in view of recent jurisprudence. Scalia wrote:
The Court today reaches the opposite conclusion. The Texas statute, it says, “furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual” … The Court embraces instead Justice Stevens’ declaration in his Bowers dissent, that “the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice.” This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation. If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, none of the above-mentioned laws can survive rational-basis review.
But a cursory glance around shows that moral judgments in some form refuse to go away. In fact, they are more pervasive than ever. Lady Gaga felt herself perfectly justified in asking those who objected to the repeal of DADT to “go home,” where they could presumably languish in their bigotry. And a university department believes that it may be unacceptable to hire someone who believes in the Bible as an astronomer. They were making moral judgments and felt perfectly entitled to do so.
Hate speech laws have been enacted by Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Council of Europe, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Ireland, Jordan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Serbia, , Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. What you say and what you do, far from being your own business, is everywhere the public’s business. Recently, the head of the soccer federation FIFA warned homosexuals against engaging in sexual behavior in Qatr because they stood a good chance of running afoul of Islamic law. The FIFA head later apologized for offending gays. But whether that will help gays in Qatr is a different matter, because one may not criticize Islamic law either. So in all likelihood then, while Qatr may beat up the gays anyhow and not have any explaining to do, any European who simply mentions that Qatr might do it is engaging in offensive behavior.
Morals legislation appears to be as pervasive as ever. Nothing in the current environment suggests there exist opinions on which you may not be lectured. The extent of what is out of bounds is growing all the time. What has changed is the contents of that proscribed area. It may now be a crime to quote the Bible. For example, in May of 2010 a British preacher was arrested for handing out leaflets saying that homosexuality was a sin. A policeman appoached “to warn him they had received complaints and that if he made any racist or homophobic comments he would be arrested.”
I told him homosexuality is a sin, and he told me “I am a homosexual, I find that offensive, and I’m also the liaison officer for the bisexual-lesbian-gay-transsexual community”,’ he said yesterday. ‘I told him it was still a sin.’
Mr Adams last year represented Cumbria Police at the Gay Pride march in Manchester. On the social networking site MySpace, he describes his orientation as gay and his religion as atheist.
After the warning, Mr Mcalpine took over preaching for 20 minutes, although he claims he did not cover homosexuality. But while he talked to a passer-by the PCSO radioed for assistance and he was arrested by uniformed officers.
He was taken to a police station, had his pockets emptied and his mobile phone taken along with his belt and shoes, and was kept in the cells for seven hours where he sang hymns to keep his spirits up.
It is exactly the same process that might have occurred fifty years ago but with a policeman warning a homosexual he could not distribute leaflets advocating sodomy. What has changed isn’t that people are being warned off for their beliefs. What is different is which beliefs they are being warned against. The Ins and the Outs have changed places, but he door remains the same. Wikipedia writes that “views on public morality do change over time,” but whether public morality itself can ever be abolished is an open question.
One of the drivers of the new public morality is who can fight back. British policemen do not go around telling Muslim imams not to preach against homosexuality because such preachers may take strenuous exception to their warnings. But the rules of the new morality are often capricious, unstated or simply arcane.
I Corinthians 10:23 NIV “Everything is permissible”–but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible”–but not everything is constructive.
Could I say the art of political correctness is not being guilty of offending anyone in spite of their behavior?
If Assange did not properly use a condom, why didn’t his companions stop?
No longer will we be judged or guided by written laws, or such retrograde notions as a “constitution”. We will be judged and held accountable to the arbitrary and capricious opinions of our “betters”, those in power and those who hold the whips and guns. It will be “the aristocracy of pull”.
As you say, we have hate speech laws in Canada. They are married to our infamous Human Rights Commission. Hate speech laws are like old time witch hunts in that a witch was whomever you said was a witch and hate speech is whatever you say is hate speech.
The criterion for hate/intolerant speech appears to be “if it hurts the feelings of someone who belongs to a recognized group playing in the game of identity politics, then it’s hate speech.” Truth or falsehood of said speech is not relevant.
I think the criterion for the new morality is identical. “If you hurt the feelings of someone who belongs to a recognized group playing in the game of identity politics, then your behaviour is morally incorrect.”
Nowadays a spoken/written/sung opinion – whether informed or uninformed, nasty or nice, true or false – that hurts the feelings of a player of identity politics; self evidently signals a morally incorrect person speaking hate.
At least, that’s what tolerant people say.
Human nature hasn’t changed, Wretchard: But, of course, we are more enlightened than our predecessors as they were to those who preceded them; and so it is that the drunkards progress.
What we have happily called western civilization has rested on the idea that there are laws, to be enforced by man, and further that we write them down and enforce them as written.
Both of these are under attack now. First, that laws should be enforced as written, second that there should be laws at all. Instead, we have government by appeals to the mob, words meaning whatever seems convenient. Rationality suffers – vanishes. Nothing is required, nothing forbidden.
This is what we thought we rose out of, 4,000 years ago. Guess it was fun while it lasted. BTW, that appeal to the mob works not at all in science. Bridges persist in falling down, the bastards
All laws are moral statements or delineations. Ancient laws concerning sexual behavior were really quite sound as ways to encourage the good health of the group that subscribed to them. In fact, they still are.
Eschewing those rules has seemed easy of late, since the development of modern methods of birth control and the discovery of penicillin and other antibiotics. But maybe it’s been an illusion, really. Consider the rates and the costs of single-parenting and epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases. They are not negligible.
If Obamacare persists and the rafts of government panels get serious, it’s reasonable to assume that they will take greater interest in the personal sexual behavior of the plebes.
Assange is really a textbook example of the whimsicality of liberal morality. According to The Australian, Assange’s lawyers are indignant about their client’s being subjected to “trial by media”:
“In a move that surprised many of Mr Assange’s closest supporters on Saturday, The Guardian newspaper published previously unseen police documents that accused Mr Assange in graphic detail of sexually assaulting two Swedish women. One witness is said to have stated: ‘Not only had it been the world’s worst screw, it had also been violent.’
Bjorn Hurtig, Mr Assange’s Swedish lawyer, said he would lodge a formal complaint to the authorities and ask them to investigate how such sensitive police material leaked into the public domain. ‘It is with great concern that I hear about this because it puts Julian and his defence in a bad position,’ he told a colleague.
‘I do not like the idea that Julian may be forced into a trial in the media. And I feel especially concerned that he will be presented with the evidence in his own language for the first time when reading the newspaper. I do not know who has given these documents to the media, but the purpose can only be one thing – trying to make Julian look bad.’”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/lawyers-cry-foul-over-leak-of-julian-assange-sex-case-papers/story-e6frg6so-1225973548657
As the Romans used to say, Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.
Reminder: Did Lenin die of syphilis?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/science/a-retrospective-diagnosis-says-lenin-had-syphilis.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-19/prince-alwaleed-is-ranked-richest-arabian-businessman-for-the-seventh-year.html
The King’s front man is in the news… again.
As IF…
He had any independent wealth…
Which is worse, tyranny by the majority or tyranny by a minority?
How many different types of rape are there in Sweden?
1. rape (she felt remorse afterwards)
2. rape (he had sex with another woman afterwards)
3. rape (he pretended he was rich)
4. rape (he looked at her with an evil leer)
…
Make up your own.
#11. Interesting Connections
Don’t forget what has been deleted from that equation:
Muslims who feel free to take them violently because they are infidel sluts who don’t wear a burkha. Its their culture you know, its not really rape.
Diversity–love it or go to jail.
The Parliament of Oliver Cromwell had declared Christmas to be too solemn an event for festivity and merriment, and outlawed all celebrations. Groups of people opposed to the new law handed out broadsides with words of protest, demanding they be given their Christmas back. The words were put to music, and the song, The World Turned Upside Down, has been handed down the generations, and was, as legend has it, played by the British band when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. The original song began with the line, “If buttercups buzzed after bees,” and went on to describe a series of upside down events, ending with the line, “Then all the world would be upside down.” That is where we now are – the world is upside down. What was wrong in the past is now right, what was immoral in the past is now moral, what was black is now white, and what was white is now black.
If buttercups buzzed after bees
And Christians not look at the skies
If pederasts do as they please
And truth is now said to be lies
If treachery now is the norm
And killing of babes is all right
If hate speech is now the new form
And dawn does not follow the night
If people have nothing to say
About what goes on in their town
Then that is where we are today
And the world is again upside down
Actually, the Moslems are the ones who currently make the biggest connection between astronomical events and their Quaran.
Conventional wisdom has it that the black stone of mecca is a meteorite. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Stone
It doesn’t look like its nickel iron that gives the damascus swords their particular properties. Rather, Trace elements of vanadium and molybdenum and others have been found in damascus swords.
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/9809/verhoeven-9809.html
You can find vanadium and molybdenum in meteorites.
http://bit.ly/f3I9VD
So you could argue that the reason the black stone of mecca is a meteorite is because the trace elements that accounted for the hardness and flexibility of the Damascus swords came from meteorites. (Similiarly you could argue that the reason for rise of the Imperial Salafists among the Sunnis and the Imperial Kohemeni Shias in the late 1070’s is because of the successful oil embargoes of the early 1970’s. But then you’d need a sacred shrine with an oil derrick in the middle.)
There are TWO very good places to find meteorites just lying around. One of them is Antarctica. The other is the Rub Al Khalid, the great desert in what is now Saudi Arabia and Yemen and the Gulf states.
If you watch TV at all you’ll notice that one program is about meteor hunters. Apparently there’s good money iron cobalt meteors. Given the location of the meteor fields — they would make a good source of revenue for AQ smugglers piggy backing on their knowledge of the diamond smuggling.
Imperial Kohemeni Shias in the late 1070’s
…….
make that read
Imperial Kohemeni Shias in the late 1970’s
The World Turned Upside Down, has been handed down the generations, and was, as legend has it, played by the British band when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown.
….
There were Americans–from Massachusetts– who went back across the atlantic and fought in the English civil wars of the 17th century.
Of course the losers of those battles– and those on the continent
typically came to America. Most were Calvinist.
What’s truly fascinating about the new public morality is the language of deceit that has grown up around it. For example, an American woman was recently murdered in Jerusalem for “nationalist” motives. Presumably this means she was murdered by Muslims or Arabs; and if this is not the case then the language used sure as hell does its level best to convey that impression.
As a consequence of political correctness people don’t read the news. They decode it, and either because they have the wrong key or are unskilled, often get it wrong. They read the words but provide their own meanings, with variable results. But it is at least partly the fault of the journalists who encoded it in the first place. Why couldn’t they just say what they meant instead of trying to do the opposite?
Why? Because they would have had to pay the price if they had dared. And so they wrote the story in the most orotund and orbicular way possible and it is no surprise if we are all misled. In the end, their politically correct evasions will cheapen the discourse in the way it has already degraded the ads for real estate.
I sat fascinated as a lady deciphered real estate ads one day. It was like she had a Rosetta Stone. “Cozy”, she said, “means small.” “All original,” she claimed, “meant on the ‘verge of collapse’”. “In need of ‘tender loving care’” meant the house was in the last stages of decrepitude. As to “water views”, she claimed it meant you could see the town sewer if you stood on the roof. So people discounted the language to arrive at their own possibly erroneous interpretations of the words.
The ultimate fate of speech codes is to enable us to insult each other in the most vile and vicious possible way while maintaining the pretense of civility. In the end it is never about communication; just about covering your ass. Political correctness instructs us all, as nothing else, in the fine art of lying. Idealism may survive the passing of the years, but it can never survive the universal establishment of dishonesty.
Just now for example, the breaking news is: Police arrest 12 people ‘plotting terror attack’ in run up to Christmas. Twelve people, but presumably more like the Dirty Dozen than the 12 Apostles. The only details given are:
We don’t actually know who or what these people are. That’s a fact. But written like this, how many people are simply going to fill in the blanks and insert their preferred suspects into the line-up?
They said they were fighting to be free, but it was all lies. What they fought for was the power to hit without being hit back.
#18 wretchard:
Interesting, isn’t it, how things change? Ten years ago, the 12 men would probably have been assumed to be Irish by descent.
Al Qaeda arguably (and potentially) did the UK a favour. Specifically, by cutting the flow of money through NORAID (which, incidentally, the US government did absolutely nothing about) to the IRA – because New Yorkers in particular and Americans in general were shown the truth about terrorism and woke up from their fantasies about “freeing the auld country”.
Potentially, but not actually – because in general Muslim terrorists are a lot easier to identify than Irish ones, but as in the USA profiling is too non-PC to be used.
I’ve been saying on this board and others for years that there is a conscious effort to attack Christianity in the education industry. This professor’s plight is merely the latest installment. Deep, snide, condescending bigotry against all but the most exsanguinated and emasculated forms of Christianity is the default postition for the bulk of the individuals who populate the education industry. It is pervasive and entrenched. It has to date mostly been limited to humanities/arts/social science, but now it seems that even the sciences are not immune from the ongoing purge.
The defense of behavior which is fashionable and politically correct in the name of “freedom”, while attacking others who point out the bad parts or have moral objections due to religious/cultural reasons is the result of three generations of Westerners who are more obsessed with what they can do than what they should do.
And unfortunatey, while most of them are left of center politically, no small number are capital “L” libertarian ideologues who populate the center/right.
It’s a permanently adolescent, foolishly contrarian, status-conscious mindset. “Nobody can tell ME what to do”! Except that you feel entitled to tell others what to think and do. You aren’t only immature, you’re a hypocrite, if you turn around and do the same thing to someone else, like Ms Gaga.
Orwell warned against a society that had this sort of thoughtcrime. Respecting someone’s right to have an opinion, even if you don’t agree with ithat opinion, is essential for a society to be free and decent. However when your ability to have freedom of thought is contingent not upon whether that thought actually damages another, but on your belonging to a certain political party or movement that happens to be fashionable in the moment, true freedom vanishes.
If someone thinks that homosexuality is wrong and a sin, but does nothing to impede a gay person from living their life, and we call his opinion a crime, we’re no longer intelligent, sane, or mature as a society. When we then impede that person from pursuing a career (by labeling them “evangelical”) or put them in jail (think calling Roma “Gypsys” in the EU) – essentially getting the authority concerned to convict that perosn for a crime and execute a sentence – for having that “uncool” opinion, we are no longer free. When we apply government sanctioned negative consequences on that one but allow others with analogous opinions towards different, less favored groups to promulgate their thoughts without similar negative consequences, we cross the line into oppression.
Wretchard #18 says “We don’t actually know who or what these people are. That’s a fact.”
That is true, but this is also true. We definitely DO know who these people are NOT. They are not 12 white Christians, not 12 elderly ladies, not 12 native American casino operators, and not 12 members of the Republican Party (or Tea Party or other conservative European political parties). Had they been so, they would have been identified clearly with CAPITAL LETTERS.
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One can only marvel at the progress of political thought.
2,000 years ago the Patricians had to endure the considerable expense of bread and circuses to keep the rabble preoccupied. Nowadays the Patricians merely have to tell us that we can stick our shlongs wherever we want.
Only in the Age of Idiocy can people who know nothing about history, who smother still-born the reality of the present, still be able to predict the future with absolute certainty.
Wretchard, the article about terrorists linked by you contained the following paragraph:
“The arrests come after intelligence agencies in Europe, Pakistan and the U.S. intercepted a credible Islamic plot to launch raids on European cities, in a similar style to the attacks in Mumbai, India, two years ago.”
Honest enough, while buried deep in the text. Notice: not just “Islamist”, but “Islamic”. What did you actually expect, a headline “A new atrocity of “Religion of Peace” thwarted”?
no mo – If I adhere to and proffer the opinions en vogue aujourd’hui, then I’m superior to you. I have found a way to signify my elevated position. I’m better than those around me. They just don’t get it.
If there is a heaven, I will be admitted because I am a good person. I’ve judged the other schleps and they are not as good as me.
Human good. Self-righteousness. A manifestation of arrogant thought.
#26 epignosis
“If I adhere to and proffer the opinions en vogue aujourd’hui, then I’m superior to you. I have found a way to signify my elevated position. I’m better than those around me. They just don’t get it.
If there is a heaven, I will be admitted because I am a good person. I’ve judged the other schleps and they are not as good as me.”
If I read your post correctly, you are trying to say that what Ms Gaga and others are doing on the subject of homosexuals or the academic department which is bigoted against a devout Christian are the same as a devoutly religious person who believes that they are living a superior life to someone who is not.
The difference between these two things in practice is stark and irreconcilable, however. It may be that Christians (or any other religion that believes in an afterlife) do in fact believe they are going to a better world after shucking the mortal coil, and that not doing so is not as “good”, to use your term. However, they aren’t trying to do anything to individuals in this realm. They are content to let those “not as good as me” suffer the consequences in the next world. Without attacking them with the apparatus of state, or denying them employment opportunities.
By contrast, the poseur NPR left who wear these opinions to, as you point out, have status, are, in fact, attempting to cause economic and other harm to the “nonbeliever” in the here and now.
Big, big difference.
“the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice.”
TRANSLATION: Fook your democracy. We are tyrants in black robes and the law is what we say it is.
Trees and ropes is all these guys understand. Of course, they control the ropes. Or think they do.
If a majority of voters vote that sucking a dick is illegal, then illegal it is. To say otherwise makes a sham of democracy.
Equating homosexuality with civil rights is a dagger thru the heart of civil rights. Civil rights are for those born in a minority. To include civil rights protection for those in a minority by choice deneys civil rights of those in a minority by birth, that had no choice.
Homo rationalis can rationalize any outcome it wants. With a little grant money you can even get a “scientific” study or two or three that will prove there is no difference between male and female, that prohibitions of sexual relations between parents and their own children are outmoded, that every culture is as good as any other, and that with the proper guidance human beings will change their nature (irrespective of the “fact” that human nature is itself a human construct).
A thinking person may say, “Gee, didn’t those ideas play out in the 20th Century, which on balance was not particularly beneficial to human beings and other breathing things?” Of course thinking persons, by definition, cannot think of anything that might exist outside our Newtonian physics.
History means nothing. Reality is what we say it is. The future is beautiful.
pac/7; the corollary, Quod non licet Jovi, licet bovi is even more apt for this season of humankind, imho.
bftp/10; what makes the answer difficult is that the question asks the whole to split into majority and minority, but doesn’t ask the answer to follow suit.
w/17; we’re raised understanding ther problem with honesty is that it hurts feelings (that to the same degree it also helps feelings is a virtue discounted as ‘normal’). So, therapy ensues and we have the problem with therapeutic dishonesty (AKA killing with kindness, trial by ordeal, leeches, etcetera).
Marxism (in what is according to anti-marxists the typical marxist self-serving half-truthism) sez that this is to improperly ‘spiritualize’ empiricism.
yikes, let me jump back out of the weeds –
–all i wanted to say is that is since dishonesty is continually being cured by empiricism, there doesn’t seem to be much ‘in’ dishonesty, as a working ethos. Except that this transaction (lies breaking on the wheel of nature) is only the visible part, on the positive side of the ledger.
Over on the other side in the negative space unseen and unheard, is the world where truth is having to ‘police’ humankind, as a sort of occupation force. So the question is begged, what IS, what CAN be, the value of this place? and we the people in it? Why aren’t we trivial and meaningless?
And –well –people who have to wonder about this, will soon enough be bubbling in the big iron kettles of people who don’t.
Maybe it’s the Tower of Babel story –achieve a level of comfort and security where lies can act more pleasant than truth can ever be, and you have damn it fooled around and tried to be gods again, and God will be sending along some inferior betters to scatter your ass to the winds.
PS, is it possible that the inferior betters can be Palin’s and not AQ’s? Let’s hope so!
16 years ago I sold a house in Alexandria, VA.
The original real estate listing said “Walk to the Metro from this convenient location.”
But we had to change the ad. It seems that such a statement indicated an intent to refuse to sell the home to someone who could not walk. This is even more absurd than an assertion that purchase of the home would enable the lame to walk.
One of the side effects of Leftism is the absurd over-legalization of everything. I don’t know whether this is a lawfare, the desire of Certain Classes to ensure that everything can be handled while wearing a suit and sitting in an office, or simply the normal rudderless Leftist Political Correctness.
The persecutors are having their heyday, so it’s easy to get discouraged. It’s even clear that most people don’t seem to be aware that there’s a war going on.
The good thing, though, is that we know the outcome: we win. That should make going to battle a lot easier, even uplifting, so long as we don’t forget that we need to follow the real rules.
Wretchard,
In the spirit of “code speak”, does “covering one’s ass” mean “protecting the current Democratic incumbent”?
Ok, so I go out and vote. I choose candidate A because he is someone whose stance on the issues are also like mine. I didn’t vote for candidate B, because he is a homosexual and his stances are the opposite of mine.
I come out of the poll and agree to speak with an exit pollster. He asked why I voted for candidate A and not candidate B. I state “because candidate B is a homosexual and I believe that to be immoral.
Should I expect a visit from the American Secret Police? Is this where we are going? Will my vote now not count because I publiclly stated why I didn’t vote for candidate B?
5 more shopping days to Christmas. JC Penny’s TV advertizing has the actually words “MERRY CHRISTMAS” in the commerical. That is where I spent most of my Christmas money. Oops……another reason to be arrested by the secret police.
Merry Christmas,
“I don’t know whether this is a lawfare, the desire of Certain Classes to ensure that everything can be handled while wearing a suit and sitting in an office, or simply the normal rudderless Leftist Political Correctness.”
Sure, it’s all that, but at bottom it’s just relativism, the denial of the fact of moral absolutes. That’s why it always washes up on the shore in pieces at the end, but we’d best help it along to minimize the damage to the rest of us.
[Here in Maine, incidentally, the HRC recently insisted that children with Gender Identity Disorder (a mental illness that involves thinking you're the opposite sex) must be honored by permitting the psychotic youngster to use the opposite sex bathroom. The school principals suddenly had a flight into sanity in which they objected. Imagine that, opposing diversity in that shameful manner.]
no mo – If God upholds a perfect standard, absolute righteousness, mankind’s feeble attempt to manifest a moral standard will always be short of the perfect standard. Not good enough. Some call it relative righteousness.
This pseudo standard, though incomplete, serves as a backbone of morality – an attempt to be ‘good’, inspired by knowledge of good and evil.
An unfortunate tendency arises. Adhering to this standard enables people to judge others who do not adhere, thereby asserting a self-righteousness.
Gaga chides others for judging homosexuals. Well, it is wrong to judge. We are not the judge, but the judge is coming. Likewise the astronomers not only judged, but adversely impacted another.
It remains wrong for Christians to judge and for unbelievers to judge (excepting circumstances when one’s office or authority prescribes judgment, such as members of the court, and parents in child rearing)
Christianity demands endeavor to adhere to the higher standard, while knowing that man will always fall short.
Many unbelievers wrap themselves in the relative standard of human morality, assuming that by being good people, they will earn a ticket to heaven. Big mistake. We weren’t even supposed to have that knowledge of good and evil. Now, trying to clothe ourselves with fig leafs, can we earn the approbation of God?
So, enraptured with the opinions en vogue aujourd’hui, people wallow in self-righteous arrogance, asserting that they are superior to those who do not join their crusade. A comedy played on the stage of humanity every day, all around the planet.
This is why Europe and the left are so supportive of the military, who has done so much to free some of the people in more oppressive regimes, and why they are so supportive of Israel, which is an island of political correctness in a sea of bigotry.
They may have repeal the Section of Title X which prohibited homosexuals from military service, but they did not repeal Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) which is also a subsection of the same Title 10 United States Code. Adultery, fraternization, and sexual harassment have continued to the basis of discipline, punishment, and discharge for heterosexual military members. Now watch as the gay special interests group moves to exempt their group from the standards that have been and continue to be applied to heteros. Up till now, because of DADT, gays have been separated from the services under administrative processes with a general discharge and retention of veteran benefits. If standards are consistent with their fellow straight service members, they will now face punitive action, less than honorable discharge, and forfeiture of veteran benefits. Of course, they’ll flex their political influence and get immunity. The consequence will be a lowering of standards. The politicized upper command will insist on ‘making it work’ by directing those charge with the daily operation to look the other way as they have will other ‘sensitive’ issues. Remember the issues around the Commander in Iraq when he put out a statement that any female who got pregnant in country was to face possible courts martial action at the beginning of the year.
Anyone else been in a unit where one troop is screwing over the significant other of another troop? It does destroy unit cohesion and effectiveness. There are no judges or politicians on the front line, only Darwin. You cover each other’s flank and back. One just has to ‘look the other way’ for death to be quick and fast. In the middle of a fire fight, crap happens. People die. What can be tolerated in civil society won’t work in that environment. Military discipline requires the suppression of basic human behaviors as primordial as fear and flight. Sex is just another aspect that has to be faced and addressed.
A thing of beauty is worth repeating:
“Nothing so demonstrates plebeianism as the inability not to even know the rules.
The real hallmark of membership in the new aristocracy is knowing all the etiquette without even having to ask — easy enough because they make the rules.
What’s right is what Keith Olbermann and Lady Gaga say.
Why? Well if you have to ask then you must be immoral.
The new morality is above all the art of speaking in code and part of the power of political correctness springs precisely from its vagueness.
The art of correct behavior today consists largely in sensing the prevailing fashion. It is a survival skill the Old Bolsheviks knew well.
The important thing was to always to have opinions, but never to have opinions that were out of date.“
We weren’t even supposed to have that knowledge of good and evil.
You may want to revisit that story. You might consider that the lede is that man will experience unpleasant consequences by substituting himself for God in the determination of good and evil – not that the distinction should be ignored.
It took the Jews about 1,500 years to figure that out. Some people will take longer.
“Our new law is called ‘If you don’t like it, go home!’”
Great. Then the U.S. Army and USMC infantry holding the fort at God-forsaken, freezing, sniper-bait COPs in Afghanistan can go home and Lady Gaga and her “little monsters” can take their place.
Regards from Logar Province, Afghanistan
The Oysters voted in 2008
And soon they will be aghast at their fate:
“But wait a bit,” the Oysters cried,
“Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!”
“No hurry!” said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.
“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said,
“Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed–
Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed.”
“But not on us!” the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
“After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!”
“The night is fine,” the Walrus said.
“Do you admire the view?
“It was so kind of you to come!
And you are very nice!”
The Carpenter said nothing but
“Cut us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so deaf–
I’ve had to ask you twice!”
“It seems a shame,” the Walrus said,
“To play them such a trick,
After we’ve brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!”
The Carpenter said nothing but
“The butter’s spread too thick!”
“I weep for you,” the Walrus said:
“I deeply sympathize.”
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.
“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,
“You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?’
But answer came there none–
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.
Maineman #35:
Back in the late 70’s I was driving through eastern Oklahoma and heard something remarkable on a local radio station.
The station had investigated complaints by people who said they had gone to the new library and were unable to find any bathrooms. They inquired of the library management and were told that the building had used Federal Funds. And someone in the Federal Government had decided that separate bathrooms for men and woman constituted discrimination on the basis of sex, which was not allowed. Faced with that ruling, the library management decided that their town was not yet ready for co-ed public bathrooms and decided they would just not have any. They locked the doors and left the bathroom signs off.
Now, I strongly suspect that the library people simply filled out some form that asked if there were any areas in the building that were restricted to one sex and then some Federal bureaucrat said “Well, ya can’t have that!” But it is possible that someone in the Federal Govt decided to take the law literally and did rule that separate but equal bathrooms were not allowed. It is even possible that someone in the Federal Govt had a personal agenda that included eliminating separate bathrooms.
So the station contacted the local Congressional representative, who, obviously exasperated, replied “Look, we in Congress make the laws but we can’t control how someone in the Federal bureaucracy is going to implement them.”
Indeed Mr. Congressman, and that is one reason why there ought to be fewer such laws.
If someone trys such insanity at the local level we can tar and feather him and then run his silly ass out of town on a rail. An amorphous mass of Federal Bureaucracy making pronouncements that would embarrass the local village idiot will cost us too much in tar, feathers, and rails – among other things.
I’m waiting to see what the affect on the ‘awefessirs’ is. Being an Officer in the US military is one of the most difficult jobs ever created by human beings. Which is why there are so few excellent ones.
ANY officer in US service can find more gainful employment at the drop of a hat.
Unemployment is at 10% but that is the average. For those with a degree it drops down to about 7, with a masters, under 5. PhD’s are only unemployed by choice.
Minimum for any officer in the US Military is a 4 year degree. I don’t know if it is official but back in the day an O-4 had to have a masters. Flag rank required a PhD. So any US officer that doesn’t want to deal with the extra headaches the end of DADT brings will just resign and find a Civilian job that pays better, has better hours and doesn’t require dealing with threats to life and limb. Their wives will be happy.
Never underestimate the benefits of a happy wife.
MarcH, you have our respect and prayerful support, particularly for all of you away from family during these Holidays. Stay safe and try to stay warm.
26. epignosis
no mo – If I adhere to and proffer the opinions en vogue aujourd’hui, then I’m superior to you. I have found a way to signify my elevated position. I’m better than those around me. They just don’t get it.
If there is a heaven, I will be admitted because I am a good person. I’ve judged the other schleps and they are not as good as me.
Human good. Self-righteousness. A manifestation of arrogant thought.
//////////////////////
Luke 10:25-37 (New International Version, ©2010)
The Parable of the Good Samaritan
25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[a]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b]”
28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
……………
Jesus goes on to tell the story of the good samaratan.
Here is the problem. Nobody is going to be able to love God perfectly. Nobody can love their neighbor perfectly either as God commands. Nobody can keep the ten commandments. Jesus was the only one who did that. He was crucified.
No one can get to heaven by their own effort.
Therefor God has provided a plan B.
You can get to heaven by accepting Jesus as your Lord and savior.
He is the free gift from God.
He is the reason for the season.
Merry Christmas.
MarcH #41;
Well said!
I am thinking I could make some money selling bumper stickers that say “Whaddaya gonna do if we all quit?” That could apply to not only the US military but the police and a lot of other people.
Regarding DADT, there is another unintended consequence that no one seems to have noticed yet. Those of you here that have paid attention to the melt down of the Anglican Church over the issue of openly active gays in the clergy will also be aware of the pain this has caused the African churches. Africa, with its large Muslim populations, has always been quite intolerant of homosexuality. By openly embracing homosexuality, the western churches in the Anglican Communion have created a situation were the Muslim elements in Africa have begun calling the Anglican Churches there “the homosexual church”. As you might guess, this has greatly hindered the Church’s ability to reach out to the local populations and has added just one more layer of reasons for local Muslim populations to be even less tolerant of their Christian neighbors.
If patterns play out the same, I suspect that the Muslim imams in places like Afghanistan will start calling the US military the “queer army”. /s I’m sure this will really help our efforts in such places a lot. /s
Peter – you can visit it yourself, if you wish. It’s in Genesis.
#48 wildiris – Of course it’s the same case with the Episcopal Church, too. I think the collapse of those two churches are a miniature dry run of everything that awaits a society that thinks it only has to grab control of the controls and drive the machinery off the road for a sexual, moral, free-for-all joyride. The homosexual activists when they first seized control also said “If you don’t like it just go!”…at the beginning. But their superior smirks have been wiped away now that the decent people who kept the insitution alive have decided to do just that. Now the brilliant schemers who wormed their way to the top are holding a broken-off steering wheel in their hands while the magical conveyance they expected to carry them to greater and greater pleasures and satisfactions flies off the edge of the cliff and hurtles in the abyss. The Anglican and Episcopal churches are dead, and every day brings more reports of decay and cannibalism among the barbarians squatting in the ruins. They’re a perfect illustration of something that’s been mentioned here before: the almost magical thinking among today’s liberals, who genuinely think that they can just rip out parts of a machine, shove in pieces they like better, starve it of fuel or else pour in something different…and the whole thing will still just keep working the way it always was, like a magical goody factory that somehow has no choice but to keep producing the goodies, only for THEM to enjoy now. When the thing slows down and finally stops, their reaction is rage and a hunt for someone else to blame.
Don51 – “Now watch as the gay special interests group moves to exempt their group from the standards that have been and continue to be applied to heteros.”
This can no doubt be another click up the rung to elevate this ‘hate’ based special interest group. This isn’t about or ever has been to advance equality. The gay lobby is just another voice in the league of hate groups under the federal umbrella of hate groups. This is about them being superior to predominantly western European heterosexual majority in every way and getting the perks that the self made elites deserve. You can bet hat the self proclaimed gays will now be on a fast track and they will be promoted before non-elite officers to reconcile millennia of so-called injustice. It is a short matter of time before we have our first openly lesbian joint chief of staffs. This is hate based promotion and will drive the target of hatred out as planned.
Try to change the order of nature to the order of man, and you do not get the order of man, but the man of nature –often referred to historically and in primitive tongue as ‘slow’ or ‘long’ pork.
epignosis:
“If God upholds a perfect standard, absolute righteousness, mankind’s feeble attempt to manifest a moral standard will always be short of the perfect standard. Not good enough.”
And yet God asks us to try.
“An unfortunate tendency arises. Adhering to this standard enables people to judge others who do not adhere, thereby asserting a self-righteousness.”
As long as this judging and assignment of righteousness stays inside the skull of the believer, it isn’t a problem for the rest of the community. If you disagree and can provide adequate explanation, I’m all ears.
The difference between Ms Gaga and me is that I am content to think gay behavior is wrong and leave it at that and leave gay folks alone, whereas she and her crowd and much of the gay population would like to use the media and government to cause financial harm and inhibit my freedom because they think I’m wrong.
Really, can’t you understand the huge difference there?
“It remains wrong for Christians to judge.”
Which commandment says it’s wrong to judge? Yes, I’m familiar with the passage regarding “Judge not, lest ye be judged”. It’s my understanding that in the context of that passage this applies to actions, not the mere act of acknowledging that according to the scripture someone has transgressed. What you are advocating – the idea that nobody ever has a right to even think someone has done something wrong, or acknowledge one’s own good behavior – ends up with moral relativism and the universalist heresy.
“Christianity demands endeavor to adhere to the higher standard, while knowing that man will always fall short.”
On this we are in total agreement. Original sin says we cannot be Godlike. And yet we must try to the best of our ability.
One of the dangers of the nonbeliever is that they do not understand the implications of original sin and so are highly susceptible to hubris. And the influence of “earthly princes”.
all Gay units will form of themselves and units that have to be intergrated straight and gay will be forced on the non gay.
Being gay in a war, If your gay and told to walk point can you charge your Sgt for being an anti gay soldier and get out of walking point or sue and win a bundle?
I believe if your good at your job, and not a fokup and not a flaming mariposa/asswhore you might just survive in a front line unit, if not you will walk point and you will stand LP together way out in the middle of indian country. Facts are some men will kick your gay ass if ya come on to them, no PC in the world will stop it. Some men may feel the need to gang rape gay troops, how the hell do you handle that Snuffy?
At What point does the Military stop being a fighting outfit and becomes just another big gay pride parade.
51. Annoy Mouse
Don51 – “Now watch as the gay special interests group moves to exempt their group from the standards that have been and continue to be applied to heteros.”
………
wouldn’t be the first time.
…………………
The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party
By Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams
From the early years, leading Nazis openly attacked Christianity. Joseph Goebbels declared that “Christianity has infused our erotic attitudes with dishonesty” (Taylor:20). It is in this campaign against Judeo- Christian morality that we find the reason for the German people’s acceptance of Nazism’s most extreme atrocities. Their religious foundations had been systematically eroded over a period of decades by powerful social forces. By the time the Nazis came to power, German culture was spiritually bankrupt. Too often, historians have largely ignored the spiritual element of Nazi history; but if we look closely at Hitler’s campaign of extermination of the Jews, it becomes clear that his ostensive racial motive obscures a deeper and more primal hatred of the Jews as the “People of God.”
The probable reason for Hitler’s attack on Christianity was his perception that it alone had the moral authority to stop the Nazi movement. But Christians stumbled before the flood of evil. As Poliakov notes, “[W]hen moral barriers collapsed under the impact of Nazi preaching…the same anti-Semitic movement that led to the slaughter of the Jews gave scope and license to an obscene revolt against God and the moral law. An open and implacable war was declared on the Christian tradition…[which unleashed] a frenzied and unavowed hatred of Christ and the Ten Commandments” (Poliakov:300).
There is no question that homosexuality figures prominently in the history of the Holocaust. As we have noted, the ideas for disposing of the Jews originated with Lanz von Leibenfels. The first years of terrorism against the Jews were carried out by the homosexuals of the SA. The first concentration camp, as well as the system for training its brutal guards, was the work of Ernst Roehm. The first pogrom, Kristallnacht, was orchestrated in 1938 by the homosexual Reinhard Heydrich. And it was the transvestite Goering who started the “evolution of the Final Solution…[with an] order to Heydrich (Jan. 24, 1939) concerning the solution of the Jewish question by ‘emigration’ and ‘evacuation’” (Robinson:25). Still, despite their disproportionate role, homosexuals did not cause the Holocaust. They, along with so many others who had lost their moral bearings, were merely instruments in its enactment. The Holocaust must be blamed on the one whom the Bible compares to “a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour” (NKJ:I Peter 5:8).
Yet, while we cannot say that homosexuals caused the Holocaust, we must not ignore their central role in Nazism. To the myth of the “pink triangle”-the notion that all homosexuals in Nazi Germany were persecuted-we must respond with the reality of the “pink swastika.”
Hate based organizations trade in misery by meting out punishment to the enemies of the most deserving victims. The victim lobby with the most strenuous objections rule by the side of their lord until they are bested by a new victim group. Each time one succeeds they must wait until the next victim group gets their concessions. I am sure that the Dream Act and DADT were weighed along these lines and one or the other was going to be given in to like a sacrifice to the gods of political correctness.
The Christians haven’t been thrown to the lions for hundreds of years so they are habitually chosen to play the part of official oppressors. So too anyone of Christian heritage.
-
“Whatever became of sin?” Karl Menninger
-
Charles…
Hitler’s ‘sex life’ was as loopy as anything. He either had syphilis or thought he had: hence his pursuit of ‘Dr.’ Morrell — an established ‘expert’ on the disease. ( More quack than man — he kept Hitler in a sun-beam mood with all manner of ‘uppers.’ Then when it was time to rest: dictator downers. Hence, the impossibility of rousing him for D-Day.)
Your clip omits just how leftward the SA was. Hitler finally split with Roehm because it’s top cadre ALL wanted Nazism to move more aggressively to the left — placing the SA in direct control of more state affairs. Too many drinks and too many words did them in. Hitler would NOT share the ring of power.
What is so ODD about Hitler is that he had, personally, no problems with homosexual Nazis: the SA was stuffed with them — particularly at the top. Yet when it came time for ‘genetic cleansing’ homosexuals were shunted to the death camps. The ONE group that shuns offspring! The one group that was over represented within Nazism.
Even Il Duce found Hitler’s lack of family and family values striking. Witness what he did to his own home town: he turned it into an artillery target for the army! ( Erasing his past, obviously. I wonder how common that is? )
11. Interesting Connections
How many different types of rape are there in Sweden?
1. rape (she felt remorse afterwards)
2. rape (he had sex with another woman afterwards)
3. rape (he pretended he was rich)
4. rape (he looked at her with an evil leer)
…
Make up your own.
You left out the now most prevalent form of rape in Sweden and Scandinavia in general (according to documented statistics): rape by North African immigrant “youths.”
It is not permitted for this to be included on any sort of list, as that would constitute a hate crime.
I don’t think “public morality” will ever be abolished for as long as people are in the business of pushing a narrative because the whole point of every ideological struggle, every drive for conversion, every movement for enlightenment, every campaign to “turn people on” is to create a public morality, to create a new norm. It can be nothing else.
Especially today, when the expansion of the knowledge industries and the growth of government means that people spend a whole lot more time on “morality” than at any other time in the past. What do be talk about any more except ideas? Back in the day people talked about the weather as fact. Today we discuss the weather as a political event. Where once people spent about 95% of their waking hours taking the world as it was, we’ve reversed the ratio. Now we talk about the world as it should be.
Naturally this is a two-edged sword. Everyone is familiar with the Robert Kennedy quote: “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” But RFK knew he was quoting George Bernard Shaw‘s obscure play Back to Methusalah, and the words are spoken by the Serpent to Eve.
Yet Back to Methusalah is itself an argument for life extension, when the immortal old should govern the foolish. ‘Why not be God?’ the Serpent asks. Immortality via Lysenkoism is not something to be feared but desired.
From The Pink Swastica: Still, despite their disproportionate role, homosexuals did not cause the Holocaust. They, along with so many others who had lost their moral bearings, were merely instruments in its enactment. The Holocaust must be blamed on the one whom the Bible compares to “a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour” (NKJ:I Peter 5:8).
Well and elegantly stated.
The Pink Swastica could be rebranded with some reference to intelligence, as measured by IQ, which correlates significantly with the gay male demographic. I would be interested to know the measured numbers of the three men mentioned, to which I would add The Commie Pinkos that bedeviled the Brits during The Cold War. One could argue that high intelligence is the critical ‘tell’ suggesting future allegiance and political-cultural affinities, more than sexuality, which seems to manifest itself in behavioral profiles that derive from all too similar drivers and desires common to humanity.
Not true across the board, but stark similarities among The “Pinks” under scrutiny.
31. RWE
I don’t know whether this is a lawfare, the desire of Certain Classes to ensure that everything can be handled while wearing a suit and sitting in an office, or simply the normal rudderless Leftist Political Correctness.
D) All of the above
Very interesting, Charles @ 57, and it serves as a reminder that all of these destructive sociocultural movements are rooted in sexual sadism. There is fetishistic pleasure in wreaking havoc and demolishing the standing structures in which the rest of us live. (See, for example, the close connection between Assange’s sexual and sociopolitical urges of destruction.)
As much as the notion of love and homosexual activity are linked for propaganda purposes, the whole project involves unlinking sex from love and the communion that is supposed to occur. Two cannot be as one without adhering to the natural framework within which our sexual impulses were designed to function. No surprise that those who choose to express their homoerotic proclivities as sexual activities are so vulnerable to being drawn away from love to non-love and, in some cases, anti-love.
All humans know this deep down to be the case, which is why we’ve had so many ways of trying to keep such behavioral choices limited as much as possible. DADT seems to have worked pretty well for most westerners for at least a century. Bringing such things out into the open is, among other things, just plain bad boundaries. Those with the bad boundaries are bound to suffer the most. Many of them will become more angry and destructive as they sink toward depression and futility, already the fate of a disproportionate number of homosexuals.
This is bound to happen to the leftist project in general as failure continues to envelop the participants. Sexual acting out and the associated sadomasochism, are pretty much the root and branch of contemporary liberalism itself. We should be prepared for an escalation of aggression and destructiveness. Hopefully, not in the same form it took with the Nazis but probably more of the kind of destruction of the identities and morals of our children that they’ve been working diligently at accomplishing for the past several decades.
W said in the opening thread all that needs to be said.
“Both incidents highlight the new normal, whatever that is.
I can only add my shamwalla ….. nuke’em.
Maybe we are moving to situation which is the in which Scalia’s observation is simultaneously true and false, but in different ways. Public morality is dead because everyone is moving into a ghetto. But within that ghetto and between ghettos public morality will be very much alive.
It will be like the Ottoman empire all over again, where each community governed itself and individual subgroups dealt with others through an internal process of diplomacy. Everybody lied. Nobody told the truth, even in the whispered lore they peddled within their own communities. Everyone smiled at one another in the light of day and then withdraw inside their walls to backbite and vilify.
The fate of multiculturalism will be aggregations of monoculturalism. The Left will build you a paradise, but as usual, not the one you had imagined.
PC, which also means Post Christian, ideology has morphed into a form of Stalinism with its own social service NKVD.
Robert Conquest @ Hoover has shown how such ideologies progress inevitably to ” The Great Terror” and the Culture of Death.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Conquest
At the moment it is a weird coalition of global warmists, radical environmentalists, radical atheists, radical gay activists and ultra feminists etc—at the moments it is still a witches brew of PC/Post Christian activists– waiting for ” big man”- Stalin mini- me to emerge and lead the Culture of Death campaign under some Utopian guise–yet again- the new Jacobins.
the problem of nowadays is that journalists go to bed with politicians when they shouldn’t ! therefore the messages cofound and become a consensual soup, no contradiction, no ideas !
blert @ 58 said:
“Hitler’s ‘sex life’ was as loopy as anything. … What is so ODD about Hitler is that he had, personally, no problems with homosexual Nazis: the SA was stuffed with them — particularly at the top.”
Hitler was heterosexual with misogyny issues. His mother Klara Hitler was overly protective and Hitler had a troubled relationship with his half-niece Geli Raubal that left Hitler bent after she committed suicide or was murdered.
During the early history of the Nazi party (National Socialist German Workers Party, abbreviated NSDAP) there were two main factions within the party. One faction (the earliest one) was lead by Ernst Roehm. Ernst Roehm’s street muscle was the Sturmabteilung “Storm Battalion”, (SA). Adolf Hitler lead the other faction. His street muscle was the Schutzstaffel “Protection Squadron”, (SS). The SA and Ernst Roehm were notoriously homosexual. Both Hitler and Roehm were WW-I veterans and both were decorated with the Iron Cross First Class. The early history of the Nazi party was marked with near constant street battles against the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The simile often used by German historians is moderate politics was ground away to nothing by the two mill stones of the NSDAP and the KPD (there’s an important lesson here for modern day America). It’s clear that if the Nazis had been defeated by the KPD then the KPD’s leader Ernst Thaelmann would have ended up as Germany’s dictator. Hitler tolerated Ernst Roehm and the SA only so long as they were useful in fighting against the KPD. After the threat of the KPD was removed, Hitler and the SS turned against Roehm and the SA in fratricidal conflict. Ultimately, those SA Nazis who were not killed on the streets of Germany were executed in Nazi prisons and concentration camps.
YBR, I rather doubt the validity of the data you’re citing on male homosexuality and IQ. For one thing, the academics who author such studies are pretty much all of the left and delight in engineering studies that “prove” how smart they are in comparison to conservatives and “authoritarian personalities” and the like.
But the main problem would lie in who’s a homosexual. There are many who do not act on such impulses, and I would assume that most of them don’t even know consciously of any homosexual proclivity. The ones who do act them out seem usually to be those in social spheres that encourage them to, and these would emphasize the arts and educated elite in particular.
For that matter, there are many who are induced to act on homosexual impulses by such settings but who are not even inclined to otherwise. At Smith, where my daughter went to college, there’s something called “gay until graduation”.
It’s crucially important that the myth of homosexuality having a biological basis be exploded. The twin study data suggests that it is between 90% and 100% environmentally determined. But cultures like Sparta offer much simpler and more obvious disconfirmation.
Wretchard:
Today we discuss the weather as a political event. Where once people spent about 95% of their waking hours taking the world as it was, we’ve reversed the ratio. Now we talk about the world as it should be.
“Global Warming” became “Climate Change,” and has now morphed into “Climate Disruption.”
It ought to be blatantly obvious that this is a con game, whereby it doesn’t matter what the science behind whatever may be (or not be) happening is, but that the left and its governing organs “be in charge” of the response to . . . well . . . whatever!
Whereas many religions evolved with priesthoods being intermediaries between Man and God, now governments insist on being intermediaries between Man and Nature, with the same absurd dynamics in place.
Don Rodrigo @ 70 said
“Global Warming” became “Climate Change,” and has now morphed into “Climate Disruption.”
Isn’t that hilarious! The weather kept being so cold that it was hurting the “narrative”.
If you mention that the weather is getting colder then the moonbats typically parrot back that “weather is not climate”. Would they have said “weather is not climate” if the weather was getting warmer? The global warming moonbats need to cut their losses and find a new scam.
Everybody lies. True beyond any doubt.
The biggest liars I have encountered outside of the intelligence world which is suppose to be the convoy of lies hiding the truth from our enemies is beyond a doubt the Political-Wall Street complex. Ike was a wee bit off. Having swum in both ponds of offal they represent I can say that Wall Street, the FED, and Treasury are the largest purveyors of lies to the American people.
Given that we depend on their data to make informed choices on the proper direction the country should take and who we should voted for to accomplish those ends we can find no evidence that monthly the books aren’t “cooked” Later revised numbers are always published but by then the initial data has corrupted the financial process …. ie. did we need a bailout to save the entire worlds economic superstructure? The political factor in the Political-Financial complex calculus is their willingness to take bribes in lieu of investigating the “emergency”….and of course now every multi trillion dollar taxpayer funded bailout is an “emergency”, only to be studied ex post facto, if at all, while the Capitol Hill Porkers and the Wall Street Wankers walk away with trillions.
Hoi polloi? They area always left with a choice. Which end of the dung dipped stick do we want to hold?
RWR/57; Menninger famously argued that we ought to drop sloth and gluttony and replace them with cruelty and dishonesty. To fit the modern scene. Hard to argue, contemplating them energetic, hard-working, lean and fit nazis, hard at work idealizing cruelty and the most fundamental dishonesty, nihilism without the required disinterest.
( Coen Bros nailed this perfectly in The Big Lebowski when the badguy self-styled nihilists, upon learning that there never had been any of the ran$om they’d been trying to locate, making them the ‘marks’, hollered “But that’s not fair!” –to which the John Goodman character muttered “…some nihilists.” )
“The biggest liars I have encountered outside of the intelligence world which is suppose to be the convoy of lies hiding the truth from our enemies is beyond a doubt the Political-Wall Street complex. Ike was a wee bit off. Having swum in both ponds of offal they represent I can say that Wall Street, the FED, and Treasury are the largest purveyors of lies to the American people.”
On the one hand, I feel if Habu were the real deal he wouldn’t talk about secret agency exploits here. On the other hand, this is exactly the same truth Senor Equis has heard from other guys who were at least close to the spooktastic types back during the Reagan Evil Empire fighting days — the closer they got to the truth the more they got lied to, so they learned to stay away.
Let’s just say Senor Equis acquired his Angletonian worldview, where at least when it comes to Russia if not American foreign policy nothing can be accepted at face value (not even Mr. Assange or his cohorts at Wikileaks, who may be some intel type’s idea of an intel warfare tool) through direct experience. That’s why Senor Equis mentioned his former Venezuelan friend whom he sees embracing Ahmed Zakayev, and asks, “What the hell happened there? Did hatred of Chavez and his Russian friends trump loathing of terrorism and human decency for the victims of Beslan?”
Senor Equis knew too many types hanging around the NGO world related to Russia without any obvious means of support, three bedroom apartments overlooking the Orange Revolution Square in Kyev back in 05′, who instantly landed highly paid jobs in Eastern Europe that somehow always allowed them to travel from the Stans to wherever else constantly, and in particular there was one unremarkable schleb who wouldn’t stand out in any crowd east of Berlin who nonetheless spoke perfect Russian and betrayed a serious streak in between the jokes about Ukrainian dyevs and emails to us about travels from Afghanistan to Iran and obtaining visas to enter South Ossetia after the war. And again, let me stress I’m not burning anyone, since this guy was PNG’d and kicked out of Russia likely for good.
I rather concluded that this particular fellow was simply a GLG 20, the real life equivalent of Chevy Chase and Dan Akroyd’s decoys in Spies Like Us, and his job was to actually draw attention away from others, waving his hands frantically to Lubyanka saying “Here I am guys! Here I am!” Unfortunately I cannot say here what happened to him, but let’s just say he won’t be coming back to the Motherland again anytime soon though he’s alive and well to my knowledge, probably back to his habit of wandering between Dubai, Ukraine and Turkey.
I have simply come to the conclusion — and this colors my worldview and posts here — that American foreign policy and our Russia policy until very recently were ruled by this globalist Fed/bankster liar faction that used Soros as their favorite cutout for various nefarious purposes asset stripping/looting, that Putin made NGOs to register and reveal their foreign sources of funds for darn good reasons (God knows we have enough Saudi/South Korean fronts that seem to get a pass while every Russia/Serbia-related organization gets a friendly colonoscopy), and I find it hard to trust anyone even fellow expats in Russia or in the U.S. anymore. And FYI, Google rankings are hardly ‘neutral’ but obscure articles written to smear someone always magically rise to the top even if no one actually clicks on them…Steve Schmidt might as well be a fulltime NSA employee, Medvedev didn’t meet with Brin during his Silicon Valley trip for a reason. And lastly given high rates of unemployment in the U.S. folks can be denied work with all plausible deniability since no one’s hiring, etc etc etc. Which is why Senor Equis should finally up and stop posting here!
Peace out to Buddy Larsen and Wretchard though. I suspect given his programming background and Marcos underground past W knew quite a few spooks and learned to mark them and avoid them.
One last shout out to Buddy — today is December 20, a particular professional holiday in Russia. Here’s some music from the TV show Putin sang a song from with the 10 when they were swapped:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pISdE5hfUEg&feature=related
17 Moments of Spring theme music sang by Josef Kobzon (Soviet Sinatra), composed by an Armenian composer
maineman -
Not citing specific data/studies so much as suggesting a ‘correlation does not equal causation’ argument, one which suffers from what seems to be an increasingly common modern problem – that of sequences with no ‘logical limitations’ (to crib from the jurist writing on the health care mandate from a previous post.) If one were to conclusively ‘prove’ that people with high IQ’s demonstrate a consistent ‘tendency’ towards [some behavior], then what? Training camps for people who are different?
Regarding environmental vs biological causation, I will politely abstain from engaging in that debate, other than to state, from my (limited) empirical knowledge of gay people, that the females seem to respond more to environmental pressures, while the males are clearly predetermined, with a significant number of men having bisexual experience and/or desires.
Humble caveat: My objective is not to incite or further inflame the passions that surround this issue, but to share the gist of what I have seen and been told as I worked my way through several institutions of ‘higher learning.’ (The chi-chi private colleges and universities encourage experimentation ‘to ensure that the individual leaves with intact and fully actuated sense of self’; the kind of exploration that I can see would drive a normal parent to tears, if not something more physically articulate and persuasive. ::)) Of course it is also true that young people must learn to recognize and respond to environmental pressure as the more reasonable approach to providing ‘protective’ environmental control by ‘superior elites.’)
68. Eggplant
The early history of the Nazi party was marked with near constant street battles against the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).
I tried to Google some film clips of these street battles (I remember them from many years ago). The KPD had their own distinctive uniforms. It was a close call since the outcome of these early struggles could have gone either way.
MrX, please allow me to introduce you an Amerikanski subtlety: When asking an American audience to believe that you are an American, it would behoove you to not recommend skepticism about Habu’s reference to anything in his resume, as that same skepticism may rebound and dispreserve the attitude of ‘live and let live’ by which you yourself profit on these pages. i say this in the spirit of helpfulness, ‘hands-across-the-water’ and so forth.
That said, i appreciate your above ref to yours truly, and will get back to you on it, after i decipher it, that is if i can, actually, ever decipher it!
…and, don’t run off –stick around –you’re valuable and good company. Tell your control that we here only seem to respond counter-intuitively, and that you often make the point of the similarity, out there on the toothy end anyways, of method in both the great hemispheric systems.
Charles,
Thanks for the Damascus Steel paper.
One of the major problems with Venezuelan Ori-mulsion is the Vanadium content. It attacks everything.
A pal (who irrelevent to this, just happens to be trans sexual) was amazed to find folk paying for the flue dust to go to toxic waste tips. A few phone calls and they were getting paid for for the stuff.
Some contributors might wonder about your comment concerning my veracity as a former intelligence officer. What they should know is that you and I have crossed swords over several issues on other sites with similar accusations about me and other topics. Seems you’re a know it all.
Just trying to give the BC’ers full disclosure on your comment. Seems I cleaned your clock in other tête-à-tête. It also seems your envy that I am what I was is still a rancid aspect of your being.
Have a nice day.
76. Don Rodrigo @ 76 said:
“The KPD had their own distinctive uniforms. It was a close call since the outcome of these early struggles could have gone either way.”
The German communists actually took over a large hunk of Bavaria for a short while. They called it the Bayerische Raeterepublik “Bavarian Soviet Republic”. Refer to the following for details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_Soviet_Republic
One of the German militias that defeated the communists in Bavaria were the Freikorps. The Freikorps later served as the foundation for the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schutzstaffel (SS). Rudolf Hoess (first and most important commandant of Auschwitz) established his Nazi credentials as a member of the Freikorps.
The early history of the Nazi party is frightening. The whole process was so logical. One can not help but ask how the German people could have dodged that bullet. The answers seems to be “No way! They were doomed after they lost WW-I”. At the beginning of the 20th century, German mathematics, science, technology and culture were preeminent (England had jumped the shark and America was way behind). The Germans through shear merit should have become the dominant culture but they tripped at the finish line after they lost WW-I (a war they did not start) and after they were seduced by the communists/Nazis. A terrifying conclusion of WW-II is a high culture does not necessarily protect a people from suicidal stupidity and/or bad luck.
My comment #79 was directed at mr. x. @ #74.
no mo – Haven’t disagreed with anything you’ve said here.
Christians are sinners. Unbel.s are sinners, but not redeemed sinners. Homosexuality is inconsistent with the righteousness of God. Therefore it is sin. Judging homo’s, sin again.
How to treat a murderer – well, how would you treat Saul of Taursus, who became Apostle Paul. How to treat a homo – like a sinner who needs gospel message to accept or reject.
The complaint that God has concerning unbel. homo’s is two-fold. Moral destructive of society and individually, unsanctified. His complaint against Christian homo’s – well, there is a child who is in for severe discipline.
How to react to Gaga. She’s either Christian or unbel. If Christian, woefully misguided and ignorant of doctrine.
How to react to astronomers, well they are misguided also. In this case, their self-righteousness is causing irresponsible behavior, at the least. Probably criminal under present law.
Doesn’t the fact that one of the most mendancious and repulsive of modern American politicians makes common cause with a modestly-talented guinea whore speak volumes about the current state of America’s “elites?”
….. similar views obtain
“Deception, like a mushroom, flourishes in darkness and manure. And the only way to end a deception is to drag it out into the light…and cut out the BS.
Two weeks ago, for the first time ever, the Federal Reserve dragged its crisis-era bailout activities out into the light of day (thank you Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Ron Paul!). The resulting revelations exposed a number of shocking truths, like the truth that the big Wall Street banks did not merely receive one $10 billion loan each from the TARP facility; they also received tens of billions of undisclosed loans from other lending facilities. On top of that, many of the big banks raised hundreds of billions dollars by secretly selling mortgage-backed securities directly to the Fed.(editorial comment: the FED KNEW this paper was worthless)
These massive undisclosed bailouts contributed greatly to the relatively robust earnings results many big banks produced during 2009 and early 2010 – results that would have been impossible without the hidden assistance. Accordingly, stock market participants came to believe the fiction that the big banks were “healthy,” rather than the truth that they were massively subsidized. As opinions changed, so did share prices, corporate bond prices, credit default swap prices, etc.
Some investors made money from the resulting asset-repricing, some lost money. Neither side reaped the reward it deserved, but only the result that the Fed’s manipulations produced. In an honest and transparent marketplace, the list of winning and losing investors would have been very different than the actual list that emerged from the crisis.
In a truly free market, the financial markets, themselves, pick the investors who win or lose, not the Chairman of the Federal Reserve or the Secretary of the Treasury.
Deceptions flourished during 2009, primarily because the Fed was secretly pumping trillions of dollars into various private companies without ever disclosing the recipients, timing or sums involved. The outside world was left to guess. By so doing, the Fed dramatically “un-leveled” the playing field of American capitalism.
Many undeserving companies benefited from preferential treatment during the crisis, while many deserving investors, savers and taxpayers directly or indirectly subsidized this preferential treatment. That’s not free-market capitalism, dear investor. That’s cheating.
Eric Fry
for The Daily Reckoning
So …the run up in the stock market we have seen as of the last quarter is the same old story of artificial enrichment, inflated by the “pump and dump” Masters of the Universe on Wall Street and the machinations of our secret and most likely criminal FED. The coming “dump” will be under the rubric of “end of year portfolio adjustments” but the number of shorts in the market and the major sell off by those who run the biggest Wall Street firms tell a different story. Next year the’re coming for your pension fund.
Georges Sorel maintained that any truth a statement might contain was secondary to its ability to inspire the masses to collective action.
I Had to call in today to collect some stuff from a small c Conservative (and not at all northern league) friend who grew up in Milan. In small talk, she was laughing about hearing Gaga’s real surname.
It seems that a “Style Icon” with Sicilian origins is as amusing to a Milanese, as the advice of a Welsh Trotskyite economist is to BC regulars.
She reminded me about a piece we’d both heard on Irish radio, Someone was Discussing Gaga, and the whole Gaga image cum persona. The example used was Gaga’s words on stage at Glastonbury, where she told the audience about how she’d been there several years before and all the drugs she’d done while there…
The Radio presenter had pointed out that Gaga was 17 years old at that time and sat in high school classroom on the other side of the Atlantic, and that this episode summed up the pretentious bull that is the Gaga image.
It may be verifiably sh1t, and she may have all the style of a chimp in a silk smoking jacket with a long cigarette holder, but it seems to inspire some of the kids.
Ford Motor Company DID take a bailout!
Transparency is essential in a free market. It enables market participants to make informed investment decisions.
Unfortunately, in America’s “free market” economy, transparency is a latchkey child. It only sees the light of day when someone breaks down the door and carries it outside. Institutions like the Federal Reserve and the Treasury explicitly and vehemently resist transparency. It is the enemy, they say, of an “independent” monetary policy.
During the crisis of 2008-9, the Federal Reserve and Treasury operated as covertly as the CIA – doling out trillions of dollars in bailouts and guarantees to a handful of coddled corporations. Those financial “black ops” produced myriad deceptions in the financial markets.
In addition to the Fed’s intended deception that insolvent financial firms are as fit as a fiddle, the Fed’s meddling also produced numerous knock-on deceptions like: the labor market is recovering, the housing market is bottoming out, the financial sector is reviving and Goldman Sachs never makes a trading loss.
more: http://tinyurl.com/38l9nng
It may be verifiably sh1t, and she may have all the style of a chimp in a silk smoking jacket with a long cigarette holder, but it seems to inspire some of the kids.
Yes, but “inspire” them to do . . . . what?
Habu:
WikiLeaks is working for the wrong side. A rightospheric “wikileaks” is what will produce transparency in the American system. The Climategate leaks and the Acorn sting are a tiny fragment of what could be done.
Wildiris @ #48
The Moslems may openly condemn homosexuality, but, there is a huge level of doublethink taking place.
To many, G-d has made a woman unclean, she is only for making babies, pretty boys are for having fun with…
The doublethink is achieved by thinking that the boy is neither being “loved” nor married, therefore it is not what the koran proscribes, all is well (perhaps not in the eyes the little catamites though).
Just as an illustration, check out the stories of anal gonorrhoea going around some of the military interpreters in Afghanistan, and their explanations for why they kept getting re-infected.
Pals who’ve worked in (or grew up in) Saudi, the emirates and north Africa, tell similar stories.
The Africans whom I’ve spent time with would put up a good act of condemning homosexuals, but;
“the lady doth protest to much…”
I had doubts about the sincerity of some of the more vociferous ones.
For the Anglican / Episcopalian loss of direction and relevance, the collection of letters from a First World War clergyman in the trenches “a student in arms” portrays a church adrift and desperately seeking relevance in teens of the last century. It is nothing particularly new.
Don R
“Yes, but inspire them to do what?”
Buy her records, listen to her bull, buy the latest must have clothes and not to waste time thinking for themselves
-would be my first guesses
Which is all fertile ground for some satirical commedy, except I don’t know a drag queen who’s ugly enough to do it, and don’t fancy wearing the bondage gear myself…
Reid cites Gaga’s ‘meat dress,’ Lindsay Lohan’s rehab in START treaty push
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/134435-reid-cites-gagas-meat-dress-lohans-rehab-in-start-treaty-push
Where’s our Henry II to shout, “will no one rid me of this meddlesome Senator?”
Can’t remember who it was on the last thread who wrote (tongue in cheek);
“the reason communism hasn’t worked yet is that they didn’t have the right people running it”
If I can attempt to re-arrange Lord Acton’s “all power corrupts”
All who are corrupt seek power
The absolutely corrupt seek absolute power
Part of Hayek’s thesis in “The Road to Serfdom” is that in a centrally planned system, the worst always rise to the top.
Milton Meyer, in “They thought they were free” skirted around the issue of the population’s frustration at promised centrally planned utopias always failing to materialize, and this being blamed on the person in charge (because it couldn’t possibly be the idea and the institution that were non starters)…
But he did identify the excellence of German scholarship and a national preoccupation of “putting the world to rights” as fertile breeding ground for “social experiments” with a demagogue leading the way.
ps, Benito Mussolini was a self confessed rapist.
90. Keith
Buy her records, listen to her bull, buy the latest must have clothes and not to waste time thinking for themselves
Oh, OK. That makes perfectly good perverse sense.
H/86; add to the revoltin’ development that the current stock market is trading volumes on the borderline of too low to maintain the price-discovery created by tight ‘bid/ask gap’ trading liquidity (indeed, 70% of volume is now ”high-frequency” machine-trading that the financial houses may be engaging in themselves for no reason other than maintaining face-saving volumes.
What happened to the legit bona-fide retail traders known as ‘ma & pa’? They friggin quit, that’s what. That’s a big reason for the low long-bond yield –the treasury demand created by the flight from anything manipulable.
Thanks a lot, all you Progressives at the head of our TooBigToFails. We really needed sugar in the fuel tank and sand in the transmission. I’d ask where the hell did you get the right, but i realize it is all for the children.
***
K/92; your Part of Hayek’s thesis in “The Road to Serfdom” is that in a centrally planned system, the worst always rise to the top might extend the thought, that the greater the reach the greater the damage. For example, a centrally-planned county gov’t may fill up with corruption, buy it can’t harm anything but the county. That’s the reason enough for a 10th and 17th Amendment crusade (strong the one and repeal the other) and a general extraction of federal power to states, and states to localities, as much as we can until we see reason to stop.
88. Don Rodrigo
I’m not sure how Wikileaks got associated with anything I’ve said but hey, it’s ok.
What my study of the history of mankind tells me with crystal clarity is that wars will always exist and that mankind is a complex creature who seeks to gain his/her own benefit.
In this country the often cited “Founding Fathers” virtue is heavily glossed with attributes they did not possess beyond what men possess today. From Washington through all the signers of the DOI and those members who met in secret to constitute the US Constitution there was lying,skullduggery,murder, secret deals and all manner of mankinds foibles. Indeed they produced a wonderful system but it wasn’t out of their desire for the freedom of all men. They all wanted a piece of something in America more tangible than a glorious government. They were venal and many corrupt. It’s in mankinds DNA.
That is not to say we should simply accept the bowl of gruel we are handed and be thankful. We should be thankful, as Madison pointed out in Federalist #10 that the size and variety of the country would keep a certain “balance” in existence between the desires of factions ready to control us. There is no perfection in mankind or in his institutions but the aforementioned help us guard our freedom.
95. Habu
88. Don Rodrigo
I’m not sure how Wikileaks got associated with anything I’ve said but hey, it’s ok.
Yeah, it was a stretch.
And now your telling me the founding fathers were mere mortals? How dare you?
I’m content with the fact that they understood human nature and respected it’s power over human actions — something the leader/eunuchs today don’t.
K/92, ps, Benito Mussolini was a self confessed rapist –he didn’t do too well by Clara Petacci, either –by all accounts a beautiful and vivacious good-hearted lady with unfortunate stars in her eyes, still only in her mid-30s when shot and hung upside down in the public square.
BL/94
As said on the street, “righteous dude”. I have very little doubt that similar to the Great Depression where there was a period after the initial cratering where the “dead cat bounce” gave some hope of a recovery. But the cat didn’t bounce very high.
Everything in our economy is now totally skewed by the lurid amounts of money pumped into the system to create the illusion of a recovery. It is helium.
And ma & pa, well they’ve been “pumped and dumped” now for their entire life’s savings with no chance to recover. ’89 the S&L “crisis”, then the dot com runup to the buffalo jump, then Enron, just naked greed, and Worldcom and Bernies ponzi scheme that went uninvestigated for decades after warnings went up.
Jobs? Many aren’t ever coming back as institutional unemployment creates the coffle of workers begging from the government officials who exacerbated every problem their ignorance and power allowed them to …all we need now is a Caligula Sotero to appoint a Czar equine to spread the “wealth”
96. Don Rodrigo
No problem and if I knew how to add a smily face I would….
Best
H
w @ 65: It will be like the Ottoman empire all over again, where each community governed itself and individual subgroups dealt with others through an internal process of diplomacy.
ya mean, byzantine?
but wasn’t the last days of the Hapsburg/Holy Roman Empire also just this way, 19th century Vienna?
Maybe it’s a natural stage in declining empires, somebody page Hari Seldon. And maybe Kery Mullis, maybe it’s not too late to reset our cultural teleomeres.
w @ 60: Back in the day people talked about the weather as fact. Today we discuss the weather as a political event. Where once people spent about 95% of their waking hours taking the world as it was, we’ve reversed the ratio. Now we talk about the world as it should be.
oh yes, I nominate for quote of the day!
hat tips to RFK, Shaw, and, um, Satan.
“A reasonable person adjusts himself to the way things are.”
Nobody today seems to want to be a reasonable person.
We’re all above average, doncha know.
99. Habu
96. Don Rodrigo
No problem and if I knew how to add a smily face I would….
I have mixed emotions about emoticons (pun intended), but the “smiley face” is a “:” (colon) + “-” (hyphen) + “)” (close paren).
But if you were pulling my leg just now, jokes on me
Don R…. no leg pulling and thx for the emoticon key.
Any Talk of Recovery Is False
The government and the mainstream media are desperately trying to convince you that everything is alright. It’s not alright. It’s getting worse by the day.
Have you noticed the latest sound bites coming from the punditry in the corporate mainstream media? Here’s the latest wisdom flowing from Wall Street, Washington DC, and mega corporations:
The economy is recovering and employment is growing.
Consumers are deleveraging, saving, and using cash for purchases.
Retailers are doing fantastic as consumers increase spending.
How can consumers be deleveraging, saving, and increasing spending at the same time? Let’s examine the facts.
The fallacy that the economy is recovering and employment is growing can be put to rest by an examination of the Bureau of Labor Statistics data:
The number of Americans employed over the last few years is as follows:
• 2007 — 146.0 million
• 2008 — 145.5 million
• 2009 — 139.9 million
• 2010 — 138.9 million
It seems there are 7.1 million less employed people than there were three years ago. Contrary to the spin from the White House, there are 1 million less people employed today than during the horrific 2009 year. Luckily, another 6 million people left the work force, or we’d really have a problem. The truth is that if the government actually counted everyone in the country who wants a job, the unemployment rate isn’t 9.8%, but 23% — and it continues to rise.
The economic recovery inaccuracies can be refuted by examining the data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis located here and here.
The GDP of the US peaked at $14.5 trillion in the third quarter of 2008. Today it stands at $14.8 trillion, two years later. GDP has gone up for one reason and one reason only — the federal government has borrowed trillions from future generations in order to artificially prop up a system already crumbling from the weight of too much debt. Highlights from the GDP calculation are:
• Private investment is $216 billion lower today than it was in the third quarter of 2008.
• Exports are $80 billion lower today than they were in the third quarter of 2008.
You may ask yourself how GDP can be higher if private businesses are investing less and exporting less. The answer, of course, is your friendly neighborhood Feds. The federal government is spending $128 billion more today than it was in 2008. The last piece to the puzzle is the beloved consumer, who accounts for 70% of GDP. Good old Joe Sixpack has ramped up his spending by a good $470 billion since the first quarter of 2009. With this figure, we must be in a strong recovery. Larry Kudlow says so.
A little more digging on the BEA website reveals some interesting data:
• Personal income has risen by $300 billion since the first quarter of 2008.
• Strangely, private industry wages have declined by $213 billion since the first quarter of 2008.
It seems that personal income has risen due to two major items. You’ll be glad to know that government wages have risen by $58 billion and, drum roll please, government entitlement transfers have increased by $523 billion since the first quarter of 2008. The federal government has borrowed hundreds of billions from future generations and paid it out in the form of unemployment benefits and other social programs so that consumers would spend it today. This is how you generate a positive GDP, without generating a real recovery. And, of course, if the government used an honest CPI rate, GDP would still be negative, just as it has been for most of the past decade.
The great consumer deleveraging inaccuracy has been ongoing for the last six months. The savings rate has “surged” from 4.8% in the second quarter of 2008 to 5.8% today. The savings rate is calculated as what is left over when you subtract personal consumption expenditures from disposable personal income. The surge in saving is the result of the federal government borrowing from the Chinese and handing it to consumers to spend. If the government wasn’t transferring these funds from future generations to current generations, the savings rate would be 1.2%.
Revolving consumer debt (credit cards) has declined by $173 billion in the last two years. This must mean that consumers are deleveraging.
Total consumer credit peaked at $13.9 trillion in the first quarter of 2008 and currently stands at $13.4 trillion. It sure looks like consumer deleveraging. Consumers must have paid off $500 billion of debt. But, the facts obliterate this fallacy. The Wall Street banks have written off in excess of $600 billion since the first quarter of 2008, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. This means that consumers are actually charging more on their credit cards than they were in 2008. Having your debt written off, rather than paying it off, says much about the great economic recovery of 2010.
Network news programs are reporting that Americans are paying cash, rather than using credit cards. However, both Visa (V) and Mastercard (MA) reported increases in transaction volumes in their last quarters. Having worked for a big-box retailer, I know that the average credit card transaction is 50% to 70% higher than the average cash transaction. If people were truly charging less, the average ticket at the major retailers would be plunging. Retail sales would be plunging. But they’re not plunging, as the major US retailers report decent comparable store sales in the 2% to 5% range.
The National Retail Federation has forecast November-December holiday sales will rise by 2.3% from a year ago, the most since 2006. A Bloomberg survey taken December 2 to December 8 showed economists raised projections for consumer purchases, the biggest part of the economy, to 2.6% for next year, up from their 2.3% estimate the prior month.
A little reality check about retail sales is in order. According to the US Census Bureau, total retail sales over the last few years are as follows:
• 2007 — $4.5 trillion
• 2008 — $4.4 trillion
• 2009 — $4.1 trillion
• 2010 — $4.4 trillion (estimated)
The fact is that there are thousands more retail outlets today than there were in 2007, and total sales are still below the level reached in 2007. Not only that, but even using the government-manipulated CPI, inflation has risen 8% since 2007. On an inflation-adjusted basis, 2007 retail sales in today’s dollars would be $4.9 trillion. Using the real inflation rate of 20% over this time frame would generate an inflation-adjusted retail sales figure of $5.4 trillion. As you can see, the great retail recovery of 2010 is a sham. Comparable store sales increases of 3% are inflation-adjusted decreases of 5%. If you drive around with your eyes open, you would think the hot new retailer in America is called Space Available.
I hate to be a wet blanket during this festive holiday season, but the truth is that there is no self-sustaining recovery happening. The powers that be, with the help of the mainstream media, are desperately trying to convince you that everything is alright. It’s not alright. It’s getting worse by the day. The only people spending are Lloyd Blankfein and his ilk, while middle class Americans sink further into despair and debt.
Thx to Jim Quinn.
48. wildiris;
Down here in redneckville, we already call Corona ‘Queer beer’ because of their advertising showing fags (PC talk:gays) hand in hand on the beach.
The problem with homosexuals isn’t the actual sex itself, it’s the mindset that says; “It’s ALL about me and how I feel”. That attitude is fatal to civilization.
American civilization isn’t threatened by Islamic terrorists. Americans are, but the terrorists cannot kill enough Americans to threaten civilization. Homosexuality can rot American civilization away from the inside. Islamic terrorism is a 5 year old with a plastic sword. Homosexuality is cancer.
Without men willing to give of themselves for the greater good, there is no civilization. You have to give up the ‘me’ for the ‘we’ of a wife and family. Queers won’t do that.
Homosexuality is anti-social deviant behavior. It has been since Psychology was invented 70 odd years ago. It was a mental disorder right up until the queers took over Psychology and dropped it from the list. That didn’t change anything except the label. It is still deviant anti-social behavior.
Queers want to increase the 2% of the population that is homo. Thay cannot breed and the disease is not genetic anyway, so their only chance of increasingtheir numbers is thru recruiting. That requires access, which is what DADT is about. Queers think that they can win hearts and minds and become a politically significant part of the body politic. They are wrong as has been proven in EVERY election.
Eventually there will be a backlash and public outcry will lead to homos being rounded up. Hopefully that will end recruiting, at least in public restrooms.
The whole point of the delegitimization of religion is to replace its sacred authority with that of the State. Nietzsche, in elevating the will to power uber alles realized that in order to return to the Heroic Age he idealized, Christianity would have to go. He also realized that it would not be possible, at least initially, to attack Christianity directly, rather the road to it’s certain destruction was through the undermining of Christian morals. To this the Left has bent all its energies, with such great success that it is now possible to attack Christianity directly. It is the logical extension of “You will certainly not die if you eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, you will be like God!” (Well, its Tamquam Scriptura.)
Note the dynamic, though, it is a seduction. The whole thing is set up with a lie which establishes a perceived but false good which is being ostensibly withheld by some malevolent entity. The subject is cast as the victim of this ill will. A third party will come to the aid of the victim, effecting a rescue of which the victim is incapable of achieving on his own. Of course this is a typical human dynamic described by Karpman back in ’68. The Left has set itself up as the universal rescuer of a whole squirming horde of putative “Victims”. Because of the corrosive and recursive nature of the process the Left itself is being pulled down by its own depraved creation.
Alas for us all, it has become Samson in the temple.
http://www.pinktriangle.org.uk/glh/213/cuba.html
Glenn Beck today said something about Fidel Castro persecuting gays –read the link –’persecute’ is the word alright. Obvious question, why does the gay subculture in USA love Castro –at least as expressed by the MSM & Hollywood, it sure seems to –? Hate GWB, a fully tolerant fella, and love Castro, who would’ve put them behind barbed wire and cutting sugarcane by hand starting at 3:00 A.M. daily –? No bigot has to bother labeling this sort of craziness as ‘perverse’ –it totally labels its own self.
***
T/105; –Alas for us all, it has become Samson in the temple —except that THIS Samson bulled his way into the temple, chained HIMSELF to the pillars, and cut his OWN hair, first before pulling down the structure in a rule or ruin rage.
h @ 103:
• 2007 — 146.0 million
• 2008 — 145.5 million
• 2009 — 139.9 million
• 2010 — 138.9 million
Yep, that’s the nuts, and it doesn’t even count declining salaries. I don’t see any *real* economic recovery – ever. That is, until we take the huge political step of bringing 10m jobs back from China and India. And I’m not saying that will be easy or pleasant, just necessary.
Is there any major politician in the country who has a clue on this?
Nope. As per wretchard’s thesis, everyone is busy with their private delusions and uninterested in mere facts, even Republicans, even most Tea Partiers I don’t think have twigged to the real state of things.
Fortunately for us, Europe is worse, China is teetering, and who else is there? So we’ll all go together when we go, and maybe if we land on top it won’t hurt so bad.
Bad, very,very, bad..yes DADT and homos in the service but they too cannot escape the coming very,very bad economic crater, for it knows not from pudenda or hershey’s. Bad, very ,very bad,
Confidence is U.S. Treasuries is dying, and if confidence in U.S. government debt completely collapses at some point we could literally be looking at financial Armageddon. Why is that so? Well, when the world totally loses faith in U.S. Treasuries, interest rates on U.S. Treasuries will have to keep going up until enough investors are found to buy them. But much higher interest rates will mean much higher interest on the national debt and thus much higher federal budget deficits. That will erode confidence in U.S. Treasuries even further. In the end, a vicious cycle of eroding confidence and higher interest rates could ultimately lead to hyperinflation as the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve flood the system with endless amounts of paper money to try to keep the system solvent.
more here: http://tinyurl.com/24rzze8
oh but I meant to add, there may be a slight *unreal* economic recovery, slight increases from 2008/2009 numbers, and once The Bernank gets inflation roaring it will be so hard to keep score, everyone will claim everything and have numbers to prove it.
I predict 2011 will be greater than 2010, and 2012 will be greater yet, and Obama will take credit for it, and the NYTimes will crow about it, and Chris Mathews will remove his own kidneys on camera and offer them to Obama in gratitude.
h/103, which Jim Quinn?
I would rather have a policy of “live and let live” governed by a sense of civility and personal balance rather than a world where people all have hyphens and the vulgar equivalents for them. In a sense they are duals of each other.
The “Q” word may be offensive to some, but not as offensive as the distaste with which it is uttered. Today we’ve abolished the “Q” word, but the distaste on all sides is greater than ever, the more for being concealed under false bonhomie.
Can we live in a world where opinions are allowed — and yet where antipathy does not predominate? One of the ways society did this in the past was avoiding the question wherever it was not completely necessary to face it. Contrary to opinion, this was not hypocrisy, it was just necessity. I do not bring up religion with Muslim friends, nor Barack Obama among men of the Left. Nor do I believe that I should. Where is it written where I have to confront each and everything in a life already full of confrontations?
We leave that stuff in the neutral zone and focus on areas in which we share a genuine and happy accord. We leave that stuff aside because there are far bigger fish to fry. Some things are best left in the shadow because if you bring them out into the lot, then it poses the question, and very often there are no completely satisfactory answers. And to avoid them does not spell cowardice, it sometimes spells judgment.
That is why I have argued that the current trend toward political correctness is the same public morality game played with inversions. But it is no less deadly. I want a world in which not every transaction is zero-sum; where homosexuals are not called names or discomfited simply because of what they want to do; but which on the other hand was not one in which I had to tell my son that it was “valid lifestyle choice”.
This was surprisingly easy to do in situations where you felt a genuine respect and affection for the other party. Once you strayed too near a certain subject, subtle alarm bells would ring and the conversation would change course without skipping a beat. What the Gay Pride parade does as much as a Westboro Baptist Church demonstration, in some sense, is it divides the world again, perhaps without meaning to, into a factions. It forces you do declare: do you clap? Or do you stand silent on the sidewalk and thereby give offense?
Situations used to be handled by the more elastic code we once knew as culture. Culture didn’t have to be universally consistent. It just had to make a kind of sense. Most important, it permitted us to make allowances for situations in which law and political correctness have only hard and fast rules.
But culture is, as Scalia observed, no longer a legitimate interest of society. And so we have the law and lawyers; lawsuit and tort instead. Hail progress. In converting our lives into confrontational, zero-sum situations we are given only the choice of surrender or defiance. With people I knew, I would have wished to have a third option that involved neither yielding nor resistance. At the minimum, I would have liked to have been able to wave by with a smile. That is perhaps the worst thing about political correctness. It’s taken all the vagueness and humor from life and left us with only our sad, dry and immutable categories.
Habu @ 103: “The fallacy that the economy is recovering and employment is growing can be put to rest by an examination of the Bureau of Labor Statistics data”
Back when I was a lad, we were told that early economists had formulated Say’s Law — demand expands to match increased supply (one of many forms of the law). Even Keynes was reportedly keen to see government pump up demand because he saw the huge lost opportunity of unprovided supply: each hour can be worked only at that point in time; unemployment costs us all the lost production of those idle hands.
Over the last few decades, economists (and politicians) seem to have forgotten about the production side of the equation. Hence the insanity of trying to boost the economy by extending unemployment benefits. Apparently, much of the GDP (“Gross Domestic Production”) is actually estimated by measuring Consumption, not Production. And much of the never-to-be-repaid US financial stimulus has thus leaked off uselessly into expanding production in other countries.
Josh @ 107 is spot on. Real recovery can come only from re-industrializing the US and bringing back Production. But that means using more evil fossil fuels, producing more deadly CO2, and otherwise pissing off the Ruling Idiots.
I remain very optimistic about the long term. But there will be some very nasty purges of the system before we get to the long term, including eliminating fripperies like the idolization of economists and homosexuals.
w/111; –That is perhaps the worst thing about political correctness. It’s taken all the vagueness and humor from life and left us with only our sad, dry and immutable categories –i b’lieve that one beats Josh’s candidate (#100), hat tip to Thomas Aquinas and all who feel the blurred charm (or lament its absence) of life.
***
h/103; bravo for bravura comment. wish twernt in service of such a bleak house, but data is the huckleberry –
With people I knew, I would have wished to have a third option that involved neither yielding nor resistance. At the minimum, I would have liked to have been able to wave by with a smile.
It’s called tolerance, and some guy built a museum of it not far from where I’m typing.
Funny thing is, in that form, I find it degrading, it seems to require acknowledging that someone is in a privileged position to tolerate you. But I’m sure he means well, and I should tolerate his attempt, calling it the museum of kumbaya might not have had the same resonance. OTOH, it might be a more marketable idea, now that I think about it. Hmm, …
k.112 is right –GDP is a measure of only two things, income and expenditure, which can be measured as one because in the whole economy income equals expenditure. Destruction of either, often thought of of as idle capacity or opportunity cost, are not in the GDP equation, thank goodness, or we would have to behold our economic acedia.
(from Wiki’s 7 deadly sins , bolding mine)
Acedia (Latin, acedia) (from Greek ακηδία) is the neglect to take care of something that one should do. It is translated to apathetic listlessness; depression without joy. It is similar to melancholy, although acedia describes the behaviour, while melancholy suggests the emotion producing it. In early Christian thought, the lack of joy was regarded as a wilful refusal to enjoy the goodness of God and the world God created; by contrast, apathy was considered a refusal to help others in time of need.
When Thomas Aquinas described acedia in his interpretation of the list, he described it as an uneasiness of the mind, being a progenitor for lesser sins such as restlessness and instability. Dante refined this definition further, describing acedia as the failure to love God with all one’s heart, all one’s mind and all one’s soul; to him it was the middle sin, the only one characterised by an absence or insufficiency of love.
One of the old principals of debate is to control the subject by controlling the words used to describe that subject. Hence the attempt by the left to eliminate certain words.
Mostly they label them hate words in a pathetic attempt to make them seem fighting words and thereby receive exemption from 1st amendment protection. Not sure if it’s working or not. “Fighting Words” have not been listed AFAIK.
http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=13718
pinched;
“Tellingly, despite continued reaffirmation of the fighting-words doctrine, the Supreme Court has declined to uphold any convictions for fighting words since Chaplinsky.”
I suppose so long as there is no list, there can be no law. This is a good example of what happens when the Courts make laws instead of legislators making law. Anyway, it’s up to the person claiming offence to control them self. I refuse to believe anyone is actually offended by the use of “Queer” or “Fag” in lieu of “Gay” or “Homo”. Now they will claim offence to gain advantage. That works both ways. If they were really offended, why do they call each other that?
Ever been to a gay pride march? Somewhere in the marchers there is all ways a tee shirt saying “Yes, I’m a Queer”. So if someone is arrested for telling that tee shirt wearer, “You’re a Queer”, isn’t that discrimination?
Someone made this (or a related) point before: world GDP is $60 trillion, while the ten wealthiest individuals are worth $350 trillion, which means the world’s wealth generation right now is about 1/6 of the capital accumulation. Who do you think is calling the shots?
An historical trend line would be interesting.
‘fighting words’ brought in to clarify ‘hate speech’ is like setting a fire in a crowded theater because you’re not allowed to yell ‘fire’ unless there IS one. So, we’ll need that list, if and when it is produced, to include ‘provocation’ words that are harmless, but ‘in context’ justify the other party’s use of the ‘fighting words’ that then provoke the ‘hate speech’. It’s like wiping your butt with a wagon wheel –there’s just no end to it. Wonder how humanity managed, back when there was no right to be unoffended.
y @ 117 surely the ten richest individuals are together worth $250 Billion, not Trillion.
Actually I’m not sure about the $250, but I’m positive about the B.
Wonder how humanity managed
Most of the world didn’t manage. And for the longest time, certain Western countries for all their defects were the most “tolerant” places in the world to live. And so they fled to America and to Britain, where to some found prejudice to some extent too. But that should not obscure the fact that relative to other places, it was far, far better.
That probably remains true, except in the minds for whom the lack perfection is condemnation. But other people knew it, because they had some other situation to set by as contrast.
Once I met a Harvard student from Malaysia who told me he went to Boston because as a Chinese person he had been boxed out by quota from the bhumi-oriented system. He wasn’t Malay enough. The other was old Eastern European man I met on the way back from the Aquino house in Newton. He asked for directions and after receiving them and probably under the impression that I was American, unaccountably gripped my hand and blubbered “God Bless America”.
“God bless America”. I remember my first morning in Massachusetts, the inexpressible feeling of being able to relax; to know that nothing was coming through the door. To raise the grill-less windows and look out on people mowing the lawn, and listening to the birds. To feel joy in such a simple, uncommunicable feeling, that believe it or not, not everyone in the world feels. And only then I think, is it possible to walk by the post office, to look up at the flag and be stunned with a feeling that words cannot express.
How much of “tolerance” was based on live and let live? And being able to move around and find a place that suited you, which was only made possible by the fact that government left you alone? Maybe tolerance does not consist in that which government enforces so much as what it leaves to individuals. That would suggest that the more in “human rights commissions” we have, the fewer human rights we actually get to assert, which is actually a counterintuitive result since the state is supposedly here to help us.
Yup, I too preferred the past days of live and let live. I grew up thinking that was the definition of tolerance. In my opinion, the advent of identity politics, interest groups and “stake holders” is what killed live and let live.
When everyone was just an individual, society was different because people were different from each other. Then came Unions, writing on clothes (brand names, university names etc etc) and all the other silly ways of forcing people to publish their membership in some collective. In the early 60′s I remember trudging into Zermatt after a climb and staring at a bunch of American high schoolers with identical writing all over their clothes. That was the first time I saw people who had literally labelled themselves – and all with the same label.
Once you create collectives then you create endless confrontations between them. So now, at a dinner party you get confronted by some form of collective ideology that you disagree with. The awkward choice is to contest it or to let it spread unopposed.
When unlabelled people represented only themselves this awkward choice didn’t even arise. People with labels are bad news.
J @ 119: that’s unless The Bernank has started taking his work home with him lol.
w, what you say about the open window and the lawn mowing, is something I do appreciate. it may still exist in the US of A, but then again maybe not. at least all the lawns are now mowed by illegals, at least in the big city, and they run a lot of noisy leaf-blowers enough to make you close that window.
my first day in Boston I went to see a movie, and the girl selling tickets was Chinese, and answered my question with such a thick Boston accent that I broke out laughing. no lesson in that at all I think, except for my own strangeness, and that of the world.
December, 20 1917 was the date the CHEKA was established.
112. Kinuachdrach “I remain very optimistic about the long term. But there will be some very nasty purges of the system before we get to the long term. . .”
Make that the very long term and I’ll agree with you. Near term recovery depends on a lot of people making decisions that support the larger common good while voluntarily reducing their own perks. To date humans don’t have a good track record of doing that. Typically we just run the system into the ground, die off and spend a long time weltering in misery before somebody somewhere else builds a new system.
The advantage this time is that a larger number of people understand the problem. But is the number large enough? Influential enough? Powerful enough to dominate all those crying out for their rightful piece of the remaining pie, who will certainly put their arguments forward with the mad and violent strength of the drowning? Focused and determined to cut the rot out of the system without hesitation or compromise?
Still, the Holy Spirit is active in the world. Who knows what we will yet see?
The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party
By Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams
The Nazis’ vicious persecution of Jewish citizens began
on November 9, 1938, now known as `Kristallnacht’ (“Crystal
Night”) or the Night of Broken Glass. Over 236 Jews were
murdered, hundreds more died in concentration camps and at least
30,000 Jewish men were imprisoned.(22) The British
consul-general in Germany, R.T. Smallbones, who witnessed
Kristallnacht, writes that, “this outbreak of sadistic cruelty”
was caused by “sexual perversion, and in particular
homosexuality,” which, he writes, “are very prevalent in
Germany.” In seeking to understand what he had just witnessed,
Smallbones surmises, “It seems to me that mass sexual perversity
may offer an explanation for this otherwise inexplicable
outbreak.”(23)
The preeminence of homosexuals in the rise of German
Naziism is no historical anomaly. Ancient historian Eva
Cantarella states that, “the most warlike nations have been
those who were most addicted to the love of male youths.”(25)
Anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, a homosexual, personally observed
that, “ritual homosexuality was a part of preparation and
training for warrior status and warfare for the Sambia of Papua
New Guinea.”(26) Cantarella writes, “military homosexuality has
been detected in the Azande of Africa and in the Amazon basin of
South America.” “Greek homosexuality had its origins in warrior
life. The Thebans and Spartans were said to have taken their
male lovers with them as comrades and sex partners.” In Japan,
“the sons of Samurai families were urged to form homosexual
alliances with warriors.” Historian Max Gallow records how the
Nazis clearly fell into a `homosexual warrior cult category.’ He
describes how “S .A. leaders hired a homosexual pimp by the name
of Peter Granninger, and paid him 200 marks a month to procure
young attractive boys from the Hitler Youth to become
participants in S.A. orgies.”(27)
Nazi fascism was born of the kind of sexual debauchery
and `victim plunder ideology’ undermining America today.
Posturing as the victim was a primary Nazi\homosexual tactic. In
light of what became the masculo-homosexual Nazi domination of
Germany, plunder of Europe and persecution of the Jewish people,
I seriously question and challenge those of my own faith, who,
ignorant of the evidence of history, either espouse or support,
in any way, a positive affirmation of homosexuality. In May
1993, Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum historian Klaus Muller
(see side bar) chastised “some gay groups and researchers” for
“inventing” massive numbers of homosexual “victims” and
“misusing the Holocaust as merely a `dramatic metaphor.’”
What Muller is perhaps reluctant to acknowledge is that
exaggerating homosexual victim status is at the core of gay
political strategy. In an article entitled, “The Over-hauling Of
Straight America,” Marshall K. Kirk and Erastes Pill advise:
portray gays as victims, not as aggressive challengers. In any campaign
to win over the public, gays must be cast as victims in need of protection
so that straights will be inclined by reflex to assume the role of
protector. If gays are presented, instead, as a strong and prideful tribe
promoting a rigidly nonconformist and deviant lifestyle, they are more
likely to be seen as a public menace that justifies resistance and
oppression. For that reason, we must forego the temptation to strut our
gay pride publicly when it conflicts with the `Gay Victim’ image.(28)
In Nazi Germany, homosexuals as a specific “group” were
NEVER targeted for extermination and were treated far better
than most other concentration camp prisoners. Dr. Judith
Reisman, co-author of Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, documents how “the
data does not sustain claims of homosexual martyrdom. On the
contrary, in June 1935, two years after Hitler’s victory, the
term unnatural was purged from the definition of homosexuality
in the German Criminal Code.”
#20 Fletcher Christian – “Al Qaeda arguably (and potentially) did the UK a favour. Specifically, by cutting the flow of money through NORAID (which, incidentally, the US government did absolutely nothing about) to the IRA – because New Yorkers in particular and Americans in general were shown the truth about terrorism and woke up from their fantasies about “freeing the auld country”.
**
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0601/article_493.shtml
“Then Noraid suffered a series of reverses. Four prominent Irish-American politicians – Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Senator Ted Kennedy, House Speaker Tip O’Neill, and New York Governor Hugh Carey – released a statement condemning activities which support the IRA. Then, in 1979, the murder of Mountbatten outraged Americans and support for Noraid diminished markedly.
“Perhaps most importantly, the FBI began cooperating with Great Britain in stopping arms-running to the IRA from America. Noraid soon became a primary focus of the investigation. It quickly became obvious that Michael Flannery and his Noraid organization were gun runners as well as fundraisers.
“In 1981, Flannery was arrested as he left his home, accused of smuggling arms to the Irish Republican Army. Unfortunately, although Flannery and his fellow defendants admitted in court they were guilty of the offense, they claimed the CIA was behind it all. And since the CIA had indeed used one of the defendants as an informer concerning the IRA, the wild charge sounded plausible enough to result in acquittals.”
This was all considerably earler than 9/11/2001, when we supposedly “woke up”.
Someone’s probably made this point already, and I just missed it. The politically active gay community is not after “tolerance”, in my mind. What they want is affirmation. There’s a big difference between the two, like the difference between civil unions and gay “marriage”.
I can’t really blame them for this, because tolerance can imply that the thing that is tolerated is wrong. The problem is, I think that when they force the affirmation issue, either through speech codes, diversity training in schools, etc. all they succeed in doing is to generate a backlash. One that has a nasty potential to come back to haunt them eventually.
No matter how you slice it, to many, myself included, same sex activity is unnatural, and is not just another lifestyle choice that is on equal footing with heterosexuality. For gays to accept tolerance as their ultimate goal would reinforce this point, so they need to go for affirmation. I don’t think they’ll be successful in the long run, even though it appears that they’re winning some big battles now.
So we have a situation where gays can’t accept what would be willingly given (in most cases), and are attempting to force the rest of us to believe something that’s unbelievable. I can’t think this will play out well in the end, and it’s a shame.
I’d like to see a situation where we could come to grips with this, but I don’t see it happening because the goals are mutually exclusive. Affirmation is demanded, and I don’t think it’ll ever be given.
josh #107:
“Is there any major politician in the country who has a clue on this?”
Very many. They’ve known for some time. Their solution to dealing with globalization of the labor market was the most cowardly and cynical one possible – looking the other way when illegal immigration boomed, instead of being honest with the American public about standard of living and the end of the postwar boom and its concomitant revolution of forever rising expectations.
Yes, I know that most of the time it’s stupiditiy and not craftiness that causes the end result, but in this case I think you have to give the hat tip to cowardice and sneakiness.
wretchard #111:
“Some things are best left in the shadow because if you bring them out into the lot, then it poses the question, and very often there are no completely satisfactory answers. And to avoid them does not spell cowardice, it sometimes spells judgment.
That is why I have argued that the current trend toward political correctness is the same public morality game played with inversions. But it is no less deadly. I want a world in which not every transaction is zero-sum; where homosexuals are not called names or discomfited simply because of what they want to do; but which on the other hand was not one in which I had to tell my son that it was “valid lifestyle choice”.”
#127 dtmack:
“The politically active gay community is not after “tolerance”, in my mind. What they want is affirmation. . .
I can’t really blame them for this, because tolerance can imply that the thing that is tolerated is wrong.”
Radical gays do not want tolerance. They want validation, celebration, and promotion. That they will never, ever give to devout Christians.
These two quotes, one from our host and one from a commenter, more eloquently make the point I was trying to make to epignosis. Judgement by itself isn’t wrong, and to make an equivalence between the radical gay agenda and their hounding of devout Christians and the quiet disapproval of gays by said group is inaccurate on a functional level.
#127 dtmack — That’s the best summation of my opinion outside of me saying it myself.
Maybe Obama will nuance the whole debate by proclaiming homosexuality should be safe, legal and rare.
W @ 120. Excellent. Captured the whole concept in as elegant and precise manner as possible. Almost makes me wish Amazon hadn’t banned me so I could buy your book.
Meanwhile, as someone who took 3 tries to pass Latin, I am extremely offended by the word Homophobic. As a barely “D” Latin student (the professor liked me), I translate that as meaning same fear or fear of self. If Queers would start calling me hetro, I would be happy to label them homos.
I refuse to surrender the field to them by allowing them to control my language.
I guess no one will mind us referring to Baz and Mish as
“that GAY couple”
Next time they are seen together smiling
I think part of the left’s idea for identity group pigeon holes is (or perhaps was) to isolate people into groups which can then be identified for “help”, lead to “Safety” or set against each other. The Marxists identified people according to some theme of eternal class identity, Mussolini’s Fascists identified on Italian citizenship, regardless of class or religion. Hitlerism identified it’s chosen people on ethnicity, and was again officially classless. In each case “enemies” or threats were also identified.
In that way we go from individuals within the wider community who happen to be…
To “oppressed” [insert epithet du jour]
I think the bigger use though, is as a rhetorical grand gesture:
“We are helping [insert here: gay, black, oppressed, women...]”
Of course if one expresses a conservative or classical liberal viewpoint you cease to be a “real” [insert group here], you become instead a dirty ungrateful [traitor, extremist, racist, homophobe, hatriot, denier...]
The tool is an old one, which has been used by demagogues, whether political or religious, throughout history. The chosen group is identified to itself, it is then shown the “threat” and the demagogue then reveals himself as their saviour and guide on the path to safety (into the sheep pen and the gate closed behind them).
Trouble is, some of those sheep have sharp horns (2A) and a Brit called Luty offered an easy way for others to grow horns to.
____________________________________
Tamquam, thanks for the Karpman ref. I hadn’t seen it explained in that manner before.
#127 dtmack
I think you hit the nail on the head and have expressed the overwhelming majority sentiment.
Homosexuality has to be an aberration or the species would go extinct in a single generation. Trying to pass it off as just another normal lifestyle choice, and propagandizing it in grammar school curricula as such, is so strikingly against the grain of human experience that the effort itself triggers danger signals.
The so called gay issue is not the only untruth that is being foisted upon us by the ruling class. The trivialization of marriage, the denigration of the family, and the repudiation of the distinctly manly virtues are part and parcel of the same package of the progressive thought cram down – that leads to what? Is the ultimate goal a docile, feminized population better suited to follow the instructions of the leaders?
Of more serious consequence is the similar cram down of Islam as “just another religion”.
People recognize and understand that dystopia is being forced on us from, for lack of a better description, Codevilla’s Ruling Class.
The danger is that public reluctance to buy into untruth by persuasion will be followed with untruth by compulsion. Legislation, regulation and activist courts will be used to try to accomplish what open and honest argument could not. Hate speech, net neutrality, human rights commissions are but a few of the tools of the Ruling Class.
48. wildiris
Regarding DADT, there is another unintended consequence that no one seems to have noticed yet. Those of you here that have paid attention to the melt down of the Anglican Church over the issue of openly active gays in the clergy will also be aware of the pain this has caused the African churches.
…………
The reason for the the liberal churches have an affinity for
homosexual clergy is because they all embrace the low view of christ. That is, that Jesus is just a man.
The problem with this view is that if Jesus is just a man then what you have as the central mystery –is a human sacrifice.
Human sacrifice and homosexuality in the priesthood have gone hand in hand through out the ages.
This is something the Nigerians in particular are well aware of as human sacrifice is still practiced in Nigeria as part of black magic rituals. The Brits occasionally will find mutilated corpses of Nigerians floating in the Thames. These are typically victims of black magic rituals ie human sacrifices.
W, you obviously appreciated the freedom you found here because you experienced how fleeting it can be elsewhere. I’m just grateful that you didnt turn into a Masshole while you were up there…..;-)
I have to agree with DTmack that most homosexual rights issues are about affirmation – or “we are just as good as you are” – rather than “oppression.” As others have pointed out, homosexuals have the same rights as the rest of us – Men can marry women. Non-homosexual men cannot marry non-homosexual men, either.
I sure would like someone to stand up in Congress and say:
1. War is not a video game. It is a dirty nasty business. Our troops prove that in Iraq and Afghanistan every single day.
2. No one in his right mind goes to fight a war. One delusion that leads people to do so is called patriotism, a concept that the Left – the people who want to change DADT – have worked tirelessly to destroy.
3. The other main delusion is machismo, the fire in the guts, the strength in the heart, and the confidence in the spirit that leads young men to go fight. And make no mistake about it; it is young men who do all of the fighting, not women. Only trivial numbers of women have any desire to engage in combat and fewer numbers still have the ability.
4. The fact is, the introduction of openly gay people into our military will discourage the people who really do the fighting at a rate of at least 100 to 1 over the useful people we will get out of this change. Like so many other things the Left puts forth, the fact that they think it “a right” does not matter; we cannot afford it.
Lady Gaga’s comment “go home” puts her in good company: Helen Thomas had the same advice. Problem is, “go home” is not what we want to tell a soldier protecting the US from attack. Lady Gaga demonstrates the level of policy sense I have come to expect from Hollywood.
Good summary. I can’t add much more.
Btw, how do you stop those pop up ads by adside.com. The bottom bar pop up ads slows scrolling when they pop up. I have firefox with pop ups blocked and a pop up blocker add on. Adside gets by them
#80 Eggplant
“The Germans through shear merit should have become the dominant culture but they tripped at the finish line after they lost WW-I (a war they did not start)”
“Inventing the Schlieffen plan: German war planning, 1871-1914″
1er août → déclaration de guerre de l’Allemagne à la Russie.
3 août → déclaration de guerre de l’Allemagne à la France.
4 août → Royaume Uni → guerre aux côtés de la France et de la Russie.
hmm, Kaiser’s Germany was bellicose, France was in the conter reaction, as Germany was interested by some of our colonies, already at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th’s. Besides Germany already had a plan for invading France since 20 years : Schlieffen plan, that forecasted war with France and Russia, France being the first fought and defeated, then the german troops would turn against Russia. (didn’t happen in 1914, but in 1940, so, apparently, the Schlieffen plan wasn’t forgotten)
Pop ups?
What pop ups?
With all due respect to our host — and that is not a throwaway; I am in awe of what he and others do here daily — I have to disagree strongly with what I think is being argued here.
I just don’t see tolerance as a universal virtue at all, and I think it’s not been acknowledged that the whole tolerant culture that we’ve enjoyed is a product of the Judeo-Christian heritage of America and the West in general. [And the notion that tolerance is implicit in Christianity is just more secular drivel. Even though it has the virtue of promoting increased tolerance, it is predicated on the "sword" that separates father from son, brother from brother, right from wrong, and good from evil.]
Everyone knew this window of charity, brotherhood, and tolerance of individuality that we have been living in was fragile, and we are now seeing it potentially going up in smoke at the hands of the forces of darkness. What’s happened is that we have tolerated too much and have failed to root out the infection (infections?) early enough to escape the looming battle. Our materialism has saddled us with a cross that we must now all bear, and that’s one problem. But the problems we’re discussing here have to do with the rot of the culture, and this has taken root and spread because we stopped minding the store and prioritized tolerance over a diligent love of the Truth.
The light doesn’t tolerate the darkness, it drives it out. There is no way for good to tolerate evil, truth falsehood, or sanity delusion. And not confronting those things entails complete complicity with them.
Maybe I misunderstood what you were getting at, Wretchard, but we won’t last long here if we fail to bring out into the open the hypocrisy, delusion, and abject evil that your column so nicely articulates. If the left acknowledged that it was something other than retrograde foolishness to argue that homosexual activity (again as distinct from proclivity) is wrong or that abortion constitutes the murder of the unborn, then we might have a basis for civility. But they don’t. They smear and connive and devalue in the most vicious and destructive ways the tradition and faith that spawned the freedom they so blithely abuse.
That’s what tolerance has wrought. Surrender just isn’t an option, and tolerance of the enemy is suicidal. Now, how best to fight the battles and the war is a whole different issue.
YRB@117: Someone made this (or a related) point before: world GDP is $60 trillion, while the ten wealthiest individuals are worth $350 trillion…
Total assets for leading global companies is just over $12 trillion which is one fifth of global GDP. (Total net worth of top ten individuals is $350 billion.)
I plead distraction by the topic of conversation. (Thanks to Josh for catching it.)
As a second point of clarification, I made the point several times that the political arm of the gay movement radicalized their agenda from an issue of ‘live and let live’ tolerance to an issue of equality, a step too far in the minds of many, including myself. I blame politics for the existence of this distracting non-issue. As someone who has been approached by gay people on several occasions, I can only say I survived without lingering trauma. I may not recover from 2008, and 2013 may be a deal-breaker. Timing and perspective.
Josh
“Fortunately for us, Europe is worse,”
uh, apparently not if you consider Germany, (and France, our exports rised up to 20% more for cars and luxuous products, when we show a ~9% of unemployment, it is really 9% !)
anyway, thanks for the best wishes
#139 The ledge;
http://adside.com/home.html
I have noticed that if I go get a fresh cup of coffee it is gone when I get back. Either a timer or it’s scared off by coffee. On a positive note, they claim to only deface Prime Sites. So Richard (or PJM?) has made the big time. I never doubted.
pinched;
“# Cap display time. For example, display unit for 30 seconds, or until closed by the user.”
I suspect that if it really annoys you you could open the tools section and block the cookie. No telling if that will block everything. Experiment. If you post with two heads, the rest of us will know not to do that. Unless, of course, we get multiple ball caps for Christmas. Or maybe the new head will have hair on it? In which case I have a marketing plan we need to discuss.
That should read equality of sexual behavior, not equality among people, a subtle but important distinction as the statement is associated with my name.
I can judge the former. It is not for me to judge the latter, certainly not from the distance of rhetorical statements about a group, and certainly not based on a single criterion.
Hi Marie Claude,
Re the African president refusing to go.
There are two ironic sayings about Africa and things which happen there:
“Africa wins again”
and
“That is Africa” or “T.I.A.” for short.
if you are talking about Angola, it is TIA^2
I have a Scottish friend who ended up, unwillingly writing speeches for a West African dictator, echoes of “Last king of Scotland”
MC@144: when we show a ~9% of unemployment, it is really 9% !
Are you sure about that? How does France account for the permanent part-time/temporary employed and working below one’s professional grade?
YBR
“How does France account for the permanent part-time/temporary employed and working below one’s professional grade?”
usely, it’s a german Spezialität, did you hear of the Harzt IV jobs ?
hi Keith
TIA will become a new genocide soon if our COS troops and the UN’s (?) don’t intervene
Fair enough MC. I’m seeing substantial labor reform legislation, but nothing about the record-keeping. Buried in the statistical employment details somewhere I would guess are a few “lies” and “d@amn lies” as there are in the USA system.
Funny that in the age of digital computation and spreadsheets – what should have lent clarity to complexity instead sought shelter.
Buddy,
My point was not to prove or disprove anything about my identity, though I doubt a real Russian like Sergey would post a song from Putin favorite “17 Moments of Spring” on December 20th — Den Chekist.
I just wanted to send a message to whomever is in fact reading, whoever may know very well who Senor Equis is — and has been behind the attempts to defame my reputation online, punish me for criticizing U.S. Russia policy, and pull the plug on me in my previous work abroad — you cannot succeed in impoverishing me, and even if you do temporarily succeed in blocking me and millions of others from working in the U.S. and a disproportionate share of those just happen to be critics of the Leviathian State, you won’t keep us down and out forever.
We will go abroad, make a better life, and come back to reclaim our country when it’s YOUR turn to be tossed out on your ear and the people wake up and realize we don’t need a million bureaucrats with TS clearance and a quarter million more standing around at airports to fight terrorism, they’re actually there to watch us and justify their own existence rather than do something truly productive with their lives.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8KQmps-Sog
Muse – Uprising
Peace out,
Mr. X
This looks like the obligatory Maltese Falcon moment. Here are
the highlights.
Buddy,
“We will go abroad, make a better life”
Do you know where that “better life abroad” is?
If one overlays simply our Bill of Rights to the Youtube presentation it’s apparent there isn’t a place on Earth to go and make a better life.
4 mins. then you be the judge ….
http://tinyurl.com/23dt9kn
Germany’s Hartz IV jobs (1 euro jobs) are public service jobs that may be offered to welfare recipients to augment their benefits. The pay is 1 or 2 euros per hour (tax free), 30 hours/week max. If the job is more than 15 hours/week the job taker is not listed as unemployed. The jobs usually run up to 9 months.
Hartz IV combines the unemployment office with welfare. Basically, unemployment compensation really means your family’s income is so low that you need welfare. The entire family’s net worth is taken into consideration and the threshold is low, IMHO. I’d say over c. $11 – $13,000 per year and a family doesn’t qualify.
One can be unemployed and not be Hartz IV. They don’t have to take any 1 euro jobs, if offered, because their family earns enough money
Hartz IV recipients can also work part time voluntarily and that earned money reduces their benefits, although I don’t believe it’s 1 to 1.
A 1 euro job, again, supplements benefits. It’s also almost mandatory to take an offered 1 euro job. One could lose benefits otherwise.
It may be that unemployed children in a Hartz IV home are not counted as unemployed. For the most part, though, I think that the more affluent unemployed non-Hartz IV and the unemployed/underemployed/part-time employed Hartz IV recipients are pretty accurately accounted for.
That’s what I think, anyway. The whole system is pretty complicated to me.
Habu #155:
We could always go to Casablanca “for the waters”…..
MrX, i thought your senor equis refs were to yourself –perhaps someone somewhere called you a horse’s hindquarter or somesuch, and you were playing it for laffs. I never asked, because i miss a lot of comments and can’t ask folks to explain every mystery to me as if i’m a hall monitor, so i just let it go. But clearly, re your above, you’ve been under some sort of attack.
Let me help your investigation –it ain’t me. i wouldn’t work behind your back nor anyone else’s, to manipulate their work or anything else. What you see with me is what you get –an old coot living on a hill in central Texas, totally unemployed, no CIA or FBI history or contact whatsoever as far as i know, retired oil patch, former proprietor of Larsen Farms Texas Chevre (weak net presence, i never even had a computer ’til i had closed down the biz).
What i know about Russia is from books and a group of Russian students my middle daughter knows via studying the language at the nearby greatest university in the world. This spring she is marrying a fellow student, now a PhD at his new job in the far northwest, whose parents immigrated from Kiev, soon after Peristroika when a lot of Jewish Russians were allowed to leave for Israel and USA, when the boy was barely in elementary school. The family is Russian-speaking Ukrainian, and the soon-to-be-snl & i argue the same politics you and i argue, it’s our joint hobby. I accuse him of being a USSR sleeper agent, and he accuses me of piracy since my few little keep-beans-on-the-table real estate deals all involve land originally taken from the Comanches. i tell him i know deep down he is a stalinist, and he says i would know since deep down i’m a hitlerite. We laugh, it’s all for fun.
Yes, i kid you too about being a Russian agent, but in the back of my mind is the hope that Russians and Americans can find an accommodation and learn to work together. The last thing i’d do is try to silence you –for one thing, i have no influence and want none, for another, your material is not that persuasive (Russian history includes stuff that won’t take the paint job you try to apply), so you set the stage for a defense of old Uncle Sam, even tho i’m getting a little bit concerned that the Scientologists have got control of a corner of his mind and the stars and stripes in a certain light these days can look a little sinister.
I’d probably never have engaged you at all but for that early on here on these pages you were in my estimation doing a little overmuch bending of WWII history –a pet study of mine, dad having been a B17 driver and a resident of Stalag Luft 1 from Big Week ’til the Red Army liberated the camp. The middle daughter’s fiance’s grandad was in that army, and could have been (we don’t know, as he’s passed on) one of the troops who liberated his bride-to-be’s grandad. Maybe the one who stole his UT graduation ring, which the (*cough*) germans had not.
But i’m not your huckleberry. my dealings with you are all right on these pages. if some force is trying to hurt you, i’m more worried about whatever THAT may be than i am about someone taking Russia’s side in a blog comments thread.
137 RWE – “The fact is, the introduction of openly gay people into our military will discourage the people who really do the fighting at a rate of at least 100 to 1 over the useful people we will get out of this change.”
Once again, look at the example of the Anglican/Episcopal churches to see the terrain the military is about to travel. It’s only been 30 years since women were admitted to the priesthood, but that has been enough time to transform that profession into a pink collar ghetto. As women came in, men moved out, and their places were taken by homosexuals.
The Catholic Church has been through this too, though it was done surreptitiously. But one of the results of Vatican II was a slackening of admission standards, and a sort of woozy sentimentality about sexual vice in general, which allowed homosexuals to infiltrate the seminaries. Once again, when the perverts moved in, the real men moved out. Only 2 generations ago, Catholic families were proud to have a son go into the priesthood; now the priesthood is regarded with distaste, and not without reason, considering the widely-publicized crimes of the “gentlemen” who infest it.
Reform is happening in the Catholic Church (not the Anglican), but I think it will be like in the days of Moses, and we must wander in the wilderness until the entire vile generation that committed these abominations has died out.
Anyway, don’t be surprised to find that lots of young men DO take Lady Gaga’s advice, and leave the field to the triumphant misfits.
-
129 NMU Radical gays do not want tolerance. They want validation, celebration, and promotion. That they will never, ever give to devout Christians.
Yes validation, but ultimately conversion: “Bring out your men, that we might know them!” Genesis 19
-
The Catholics need a Chris Christi as Pope. Somebody young, angry, two-fisted and kick-ass.
157. RWE
“but there are no waters in Casablanca”
“RWE looks like we were misinformed”
The RC Church relaxed its standards in the 60s and recruited many gay priests who felt empowered to act out under the psychology of –if it feels good do it–90% of the sex offense cases involved boys and most of them were of an age that is now legal in Holland— a shame and a nightmare–which the Pope has now ended.
Obviously in the past there were good non hetero-sexual priests but they did not act out or promote ” gay pride” ie narcissism.
Apart from moral considerations there are also public health issues–50% of Black male gays/bi sexuals in the US have HIV/AIDS and the behavior across the male gay behavior has not changed, including many other difficult to treat or impossible to treat debilitating and lethal infections which are highly contagious
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/hiv-study-reveals-alarming-trend-showing-younger-men-are-more-willing-to-take-risks/story-e6frg8y6-1225969700887
The US Military is not a laboratory for social experiments—its mission is to kill or neutralize our enemies.
Twice while on active duty (long before DADT) I was approached by homosexuals. On the first occasion it was by a group who, based more on skin color than anything else, proposed to force me to engage. A bared Buck knife and evident determination to use it demonstrated that to them that the game was not worth the candle. The second was a more circumspect approach by an individual. A quick, sharp and painful rejection served to convey my regrets. In the first instance no further action was possible, in the second no further action was necessary.
I was brought up in an age when people did not discuss sexual relationships in polite society, and in a culture in which public displays of affection were not encouraged. Such displays I regard as a violation of my right to privacy. By engaging in what is property private behavior in public the boundaries which define the intimate “us” from the rest of the world are breached. Not only is the secret essence of the relationship broadcast to all and sundry, but all who witness it are willy-nilly forced to participate in it. Formerly sexual acts, including make out sessions, were conducted in dark and private places, beyond the view of the casual public, not because of any shame about the nature of the relationship itself, but to protect the relationship’s unique and vulnerable core of intimacy. Many such relationships consist in no more than a sharing of physical pleasure, but even if, as is the nature of them, the heart and soul are not involved, it is the sharing of heart and soul that is their essence. Today it is not uncommon for sexual relationships to be expressed, up to and including full consummation, to be performed in full view of enthusiastically admiring crowds in our public schools and other public places. By so doing intimacy in relationship is defiled and the individuals involved, both as actors and spectators, debased.
The whole thrust of sexual liberation for two generations has been to devalue intimate relationships. Humans are defined by our relationships. In Christian theology is the most natural thing in the world, as we are created in the Imago Dei, which is at heart an eternal sharing of loving relationship with the Trinitarian Persons, and by extension, all of creation. To undermine relationships is to corrode the value of the individual, reducing him from his status as son or daughter of God to that of a cog in a machine. Only such cogs are the suitable building blocks for the tyranny of the State, the ultimate goal of the Left.
Oops, look a the time! Gotta go.
Tamquam@164: Nicely said. I would only add that rape (incest, child abuse, and spousal abuse) are separate issues, representing a violation of civil rights and as such well belong in the public spheres of state bureaucracy and the justice system. The rest of it, not so much.
“the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice.”
Are you kidding me?
IT IS THE BASIS FOR ALL LAW YOU MORONS!
Is this why wholesale murder has a de facto legal presence in Compton?
What a stupid, stinking country this has turned into. Why not release everyone in prison and give them justice robes and an apology for moralizing?
Who is the next Columbus and when can I move to a new planet sans politically correct perverse racists who believe all normal people are in fact the perverse racists? Bizarro Earth was funny in Superman but in real life it is somewhat problematic.
No matter how “respectable” homosexuality becomes it will never stop being an immense tragedy to the parent whose child is a homosexual.
165. YBR
Tamquam@164: Nicely said. I would only add that rape (incest, child abuse, and spousal abuse) are separate issues, representing a violation of civil rights and as such well belong in the public spheres of state bureaucracy and the justice system.
Yes. I’d only point out that they are violations of civil rights a posteriori; they are criminal because they inflict violence on the sovereign integrity of the person and that person’s inviolable right to self determination.
Never mind serving with gay troops in war time. What about serving with them at shower time? Good luck with that…
Also, regarding law: I am under the impression that today (and for some time in the past), protecting the minority from the “tyranny of the majority” is more important than any other legal consideration. I don’t know whether that’s good legal thinking, but that’s the way it is.
I wonder what this Gaga creature will say when she is stuffed into a burqua after we lose? It was all a mistake? I think not. Probably it will be something like how could you let me down?
I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I surely woke up a few years ago in a foreign country. I’m 58 years old and live in Texas but this country is becoming very unfamiliar to me. It’s very sad.
103. Debit cards could account for the discrepancy.
Haven’t said it here for a long, long while;
even if it is the Christmas season;
won’t let year end without piercing denial:
Slaughter now or slaughter later.
Slaughter later = slaughter more.
The Shoah was the final judgement against Mankind. Understand that.
G-d in His infinite Mercy is bringing His people back to our Land. Yet even after the murder of the 6 million, murder committed before the eyes of the world, murder countenanced and abetted by almost every nation, and the murder of one and one-half million Jews under the age of five, the world has no mercy for the Jew.
It was the Jew who brought morality to an immoral world. The lessons of the Lord G-d of Israel. The gift of a better life and a better Mankind.
The United Nations elected a Nazi to its highest office. The Catholic Church elevated a Nazi to its highest office. Do you think there are no consequences to these actions? That the Almighty will demonstrate only Mercy and never Justice? That a society that denies Justice to the Jew will grant Justice to you? Anti-semitism is a sickness of the spirit as well as the mind. To be a true anti-semite is to be a true hater of G-d. The anti-semite hates G-d so he must hate the Jews as we are a testament, a symbol of HIs Truth. Anti-semitismis a global disease. Therefore hatred of G-d is also a global disease.
Society as we know it is coming apart at the seams. The world will only wake up when it is too late.
Nothing that is happening now is a surprise. Everything has been foretold. It is not my fault if you wish to remain blind or laugh, it is true none-the-less
Only complete and total support for Israel in every inch of of Eretz Israel will save the planet. That is Mankinds only hope.
Your article is brilliant. In your very sophisticated language, you tell it like it is. You are courageous for doing so. In this time, we are permitted only to declare our loyalties. Argument is altogether unacceptable. All we can do is declare our loyalties to our superiors or keep our mouths shut. In a word, power is the actual coin of this time. Those who have some power, through position, wealth, or other means go unchallenged. This time is the opposite of the Sixties, which saw great struggles for liberty. Today we are limited to protecting our selves from the damage we might suffer if we exercised liberty, especially our freedom of speech. PC has won. How hard on us PC will become is anyone’s guess.
” In the generation when the Messiah comes, young men will insult the old, and old men will stand before the young [to give them honor]; daughters will rise up against their mothers, and daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law. The people shall be dog-faced, and a son will not be abashed in his father’s presence. It has been taught, R. Nehemiah said: In the generation of the Messiah’s coming impudence will increase, esteem be perverted. [Sanhedrin 97a]
The Wisdom of the learned will degenerate; fearers of sin will be despised; and the truth will be lacking. Youths will put old men to shame. [Sotah 49b]
Judaism will suffer greatly because of these upheavals. There is a tradition that the Jews will split up into various groups, each laying claim to the truth, as the Talmud says, “Our truth shall be divided into flocks” (Sanhedrin 97a). This will make it exceedingly difficult, almost impossible, to discern true Ju daism from the false. This is the meaning of the prophecy, “Truth will fail” (Isaiah 59:15).
Maimonides, in his Epistle to Yemen even predicted that many will leave the fold of Judaism completely, without maliciously intending to do harm to the Jewish people, and the nation shall suffer immensely as a result of their actions. This is how our sages interpret the prophecy, “The wicked shall do wickedly, and not understand” (Daniel 12:10)..
Of course, there will he some Jews who remain true to their traditions. They will realize that they are witnessing the death throes of a degenerate old order and will not be drawn into it. But they will suffer all the more for this, and be dubbed fools for not conforming to the liberal ways of the premessianic age. This is the meaning of the prophecy (Isaiah 59:15), “He who departs from evil will be considered a fool” (Sanhedrin 97a).
http://www.moshiach.com/what-will-happen/the-moshiach-in-our-time.html
Long Live Israel! And those who stand with her, because they know they are standing also for the mystery and the search that it pulls from us.
Good work here but it’s amazing to me how you can write so forcefully about a perceptual trap when there is no racial dimension to it and how you fail to apply the same principles to people with the same last name as yourself. The truth is right in front of you, you just have to apply principles even handedly.
For those of you getting pop-ups, you are dragging them here with your visits to other sites. Purge your cookies and cache. No more pop ups.