Disclaimer

This blog isn't really a part of my life at the moment, which should be fairly obvious from looking at the dates of the most recent updates, but I realised that people might still find their way here and read this stuff long after I've written it. The traffic reports say at least a few people are every week. I thought it might therefore be good to point out that the posts, especially as you go further back, do not necessarily represent my current views, but rather my views at the time of writing. I have only ever edited them afterwards if it became apparent that they were poorly expressed; I have not sought to rewrite the history of my ideological development by altering the meaning of what I wished to say at the time. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to pick this up again after finishing my thesis in the spring.

I Want Him Back Before Ten, Young Man

Social conservatives are often asked why they focus on gay marriage as a threat to the traditional family. Why don't they turn their fire on single parenthood or serial divorce, two much greater threats to the 'family values' that they care about so much? The implication is often that they are motivated to oppose gay marriage not so much out of genuine concern for the family as out of 'homophobic' bigotry.

'Homophobia,' like its sibling 'Islamophobia,' is an interesting term, and one that is similarly blatantly and persistently misused as a hammer against legitimate, or even illegitimate, but reasoned, critiques. There may actually be such a thing as genuine homophobia, although I have never encountered it in person. Presumably, a person exhibiting such a phobia would believe that you can get AIDS from touching 'a gay' or that they can turn your children gay by looking at them or something similarly irrational and ridiculous. Again, I have never encountered this sort of belief, but that's not to say it doesn't exist.

What I have encountered repeatedly is the term being thrown around with a wild abandon that it does not warrant, and one of the areas in which this happens is in highlighting the way social conservatives focus on gay marriage. This is not, usually, a manifestation of 'homophobic' bigotry. Social conservatives are, of course, also dead set against heterosexual threats to the family, in particular the encouragement and legitimisation of serial divorce and 'lifestyle' single parenthood. They simply believe that those battles are already lost, and that gay marriage is the only one of the three that they have a hope of stopping.

I, personally, have come to a somewhat different conclusion, both about the threat which homosexual marriage poses to the family and the extent to which the battles against serial divorce and single-parenthood-by-choice are lost causes. In fact, as far-fetched as this might sound to the seasoned culture-warrior, I have come to believe that the future of social conservatism lies in embracing homosexual marriage, and that this is a position of strength from which to strike at serial divorce and 'lifestyle' single-parenthood.

It seems clear to me, after much deliberation, that the chief hurdle to the acceptance of homosexuality by any social conservative who, like myself, is motivated not by the desire to impose God's law on others but out of simple concern for the stability and moral welfare of society, is not same-sex attraction or partnership per se, but rather the baggage that it carries with it from the sexual liberation movement.

This baggage is really of two types. The first, and by far the most straightforward, is the extreme promiscuity that has been associated with homosexuality not just from the first grand 'coming out,' as it were, of the modern homosexual-liberation movement, but also historically. This obviously has to do with the fact that embracing homosexuality has meant rejecting strictly Biblical morality. However, all people need to do to avoid extreme promiscuity following on from homosexuality as a matter of course is to realise there are more than strictly Biblical reasons to reject it, contributing as it does to the emotionally, mentally, and spiritually unhealthy divorcing of sexual activity from emotional investment and fulfilment, and, most damagingly, the degradation of people into objects. There is no reason why this should be any less true for homosexuals than for heterosexuals.

Promiscuity is very much a street-level consequence of the sexual revolution that can be dealt with in large part on a personal level, although there is some institutional encouragement of it that we could do without.

Much more difficult is the academic fallout, in the form of the insistence, derived from a particular strain of postmodern social theory known as 'queer theory,' that it is prejudiced and bigoted, not to mention mistaken, to even consider heterosexuality to be normal. Indeed, in the academic sphere, the acceptance of homosexuality has been tied up with the attempt to undermine the idea that any sort of relationship or sexual orientation can be considered 'normal,' much less that one should be held up as an ideal (or as such 'queer theorists' themselves might put it, with "the attempt to undermine the dominant heterosexist paradigm and the oppressive hegemony of binary conceptions of gender and orientation"). They even question the division into two basic sexes (that's the 'binary' bit). Essentially these theorists seek to subvert the idea that we we can or should treat anything--anything, even the idea that marriage is between two people--as normal. These are just some of the conclusions they have arrived at--to delve directly into the post-structuralist errors that fuel the discipline is beyond the scope of this piece. However, the reasonable fear of conservatives is that acceptance of homosexuality must necessarily entail the acceptance that our ideas of what is normal in terms of sexuality and gender roles are socially constructed, rather than biologically determined, and thus leaves an opening through which this pernicious 'queer theory' can insert itself into our national life, insisting that people abandon any sort of judgement about what sort of relationships or sexual practices are either proper or normal.

In the first year of my history course, we were forcibly acquainted with a number of the more theoretical and politicised approaches that have polluted the discipline in the last several decades. One of these approaches was gender history. Confusingly, and like so many of these approaches, it contains a useful corrective to previous historical practice smothered and overwhelmed by a mass of hostile, overextended theory and politicised rhetoric. In the case of gender history, it is useful indeed--not to mention fascinating--to examine how past societies came to construct their ideas of what it means to be masculine or feminine, as well of course to examine what those ideas were. No one who has studied the past, or other present societies for that matter, can have any doubt that different societies can have vastly different ideas about the proper roles of men and women. Analysing these is far from simple, because within these societies there are often many different acceptable archetypes for a masculine or feminine life, and these themselves are influenced or often subdivided by social status, location, or many other things. Then there is the further examination of to what extent the reality matched the societal ideal, which will not just be different across societies, but in the same society over time or across social class, and so on. It is interesting to note that homosexual attraction was sometimes integral to a society's conception of manhood. But this was not homosexuality as we understand it, as a distinct orientation, but rather as part of a normal, primarily heterosexual life, which would also include marriage and procreation.

In general, one of the great benefits of historical study is that it allows us to gain a greater understanding of what is specific to one time and place, including our own, and what tends to be constant across human societies and civilisations. By studying how people did things differently, moreover, we can learn what directions we might take our society in, and how some things which the more short-sighted take for granted as necessary or absolute are in fact transient or recent affectations. You can see how this might indeed undermine the very concept of normality and lead to to the subversive conclusions of queer theory detailed above.

Yet to embrace these conclusions is to be blind to the fact that determining something to be socially-constructed is not alone good reason to undermine and subvert it. As Burke argued, it is the hidden and unquestioned power relationships and taboos, what Gramsci would later term 'hegemony,' that keep society from devolving into a chaotic state, where the only thing that prevents violent disorder is not civil consensus, affection for countrymen and allegiance to cherished institutions, but simply fear of punishment. Speaking of the attempt by the revolutionaries in France to sweep away all the old attachments and superstitions that maintained civil society, Burke writes:

“...laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows."

There was one gender historian we encountered, whose name unfortunately escapes me, and whom I have subsequently been unable to re-locate, who included in his introduction a caveat acknowledging that although he devoted great energy to analysing the structure of, in his case, the Tudor family, this did not necessarily constitute a critique. Indeed, his study equipped him rather to understand why these power relationships, however socially constructed, were needed for the maintenance of good order. At the time, I argued that the fact that he felt the need to include this caveat was a further indication of the overwhelmingly subversive orientation of his field. Yet he shows how politicised baggage may be shed even where it seems to be inextricably intertwined with prevailing thought.

For my part, I would point out that the study of history can shed light on how valuable some of our socially-constructed attitudes are. For example, it never ceases to amaze, and slightly scare me, how unique and fragile is the current western intellectual consensus and entente which condemns aggressive war, slavery, and genocide. These are things which the vast majority of societies throughout history were far more likely to celebrate than condemn, or simply regard as an unquestioned part of the human experience. This is to pick only the most vivid and striking example. On a more individual level, and one more directly relevant to the issue at hand, the idea that heterosexual marriage is first and foremost a loving partnership of equals, rather than an unequal and primarily economic, political, or procreatory relationship is very new indeed and still limited to only parts of the world. Does this mean our modern, western institution of loving partnership must be questioned and subverted?

I believe I have thus demonstrated that homosexuality can be divorced from both promiscuity and the genuinely and self-consciously subversive queer theory. I have shown that accepting that our masculine and feminine ideals are culturally-constructed does not mean we must accede to their subversion. Conservatives, at whom this argument is directed, will accept that these different masculine and feminine roles are vital to the proper functioning of society and particularly to the raising of children. That is something that, as a social conservative, I firmly believe. So how can I square that with endorsement of homosexual partnership, and with it the raising of children in homosexual couples?

The answer relies, as do so many of the answers, on probability, which allows us to make generalisations and subscribe to ideals without necessarily making judgements about any given individual.

Along with the belief that complementary masculine and feminine roles are vital to the functioning of society and the raising of children, it is also a tenet of conservatism that these male and female roles are not entirely social constructs but that men, on average, have a greater natural aptitude, on a biological level, for the male roles, just as women have, on average, a greater aptitude for the female roles. The key words here are 'on average.'

Men are, on average, stronger than women, for basic biological reasons. This is a statement that you would have to be crazy to deny. This makes your average man more suited for traditionally-male roles which require this ability. And yet this basic biological fact says nothing about the strength of any given man versus the strength of any given woman. And strength is only the most visible--the same is true of any other aspect where men and women biologically diverge. Establishing that women are, on the whole, more likely to be suited for the female role in the raising of children says nothing about whether any given woman is suitable for that role.

Feminists and the like need to understand that the biological nature of men and women means that given complete freedom to make our own lifestyle choices, there will be an uneven distribution of men and women in the roles society provides, and that this is not necessarily evidence of any sort of socially-constructed bias or current discrimination. But conservatives need to understand that men may not always fill the masculine role, and women may not always fill the feminine one. When gay couples successfully raise well-adjusted children, as they have been proven to do, this is necessarily the case.

The future I hope for, and intend to work towards, is one in which parents will raise their children to value stable, loving, committed sexual relationships of two complementary partners, constituted primarily for the raising of children, without any prejudice as to which combination of sexes comprise that relationship. It would be great if we could agree to call this marriage. When homosexuality loses its radical and subversive baggage, then will it really have come of age. Then it will reinforce, rather than threaten, the forces of morality and stability. For social conservatives, this is best result we could hope for, and I think it will ultimately strengthen, not weaken, the importance and centrality of the nuclear family in the raising of children.

In Your Own House

Note: This was originally conceived as a short introduction to the following post, but both grew into their own distinct article

One of the recurring themes of this blog is how things that were once outlandish jokes all too quickly become dangerously close to reality. So it is with the oft-repeated quip that the way things are going, soon gay marriage will not just be permitted, but will be mandatory. This is a joke which is darkly muttered by some on the right, as well as being used by those on the left to mock the 'homophobic' fears of just such people. In its bumper sticker form, which, having grown up in Seattle, I am very familiar with, it goes, "Against gay marriage? Don't have one."

I can state with a reasonable amount of confidence that having a gay marriage will never be mandatory. But no one, absolutely no one, no matter how much of a religious-right stereotype, seriously fears that. That will remain, forever, a joke. What social conservatives really feared, and what has now become reality, is not that they will be forced into gay marriages themselves but that they will be forced to participate in the gay marriages of others. A Telegraph article from not too long ago reveals how two Christian registrars are being subject to an investigation not because they turned down gay couples, as did a previous registrar who made headlines, but because, by privately arranging to swap shifts with other workers, they contrived, without turning down a single couple or making any sort of a scene, to avoid having to personally register gay partnerships.

This seems to be to be the epitome of quiet tolerance, the very most they could do to accommodate both their own beliefs and the acknowledged rights of gay couples. And yet they were reported--denounced, really, in the finest Maoist tradition--at an 'equality seminar.'

This goes beyond the public sector. This article demonstrates how licensing laws have allowed the government to intrude on private business, even those run out of people's homes. And that is hardly the end of it. There need not even be the remotest government connection for 'civil rights' groups to reach out and try to stamp on Christians' exercising of their religious conscience wherever they find it, as was revealed in this disgraceful episode.

I have long believed that while anti-discrimination laws are vital to the fair and equitable operation of the public sector, they have no place in the private sector, which should be an arena for free choice, both the free choice of the business to serve and employ who they like, for whatever reason, and the free choice of the consumer to buy or boycott as they please. What these activists seem to forget is that the wonderful institution of the free market has this as a built in remedy. One of the very first articles I wrote on this blog was about how the boycott is the heart and soul of capitalism, allowing us to make our commercial choices not just on financial, but also moral grounds. If people remembered this, rather than always looking to legal action as a first option, society would be much, much better off. Unfortunately, a lawsuit for discrimination is often an easy way to turn your 'hurt feelings' into cash (I was shocked, although I really shouldn't have been, when I first found out that damages were actually awarded for 'injury to feelings'), while a boycott requires self-discipline and occasional sacrifice. It is clear which one most people will chose, especially because of the self-righteousness of a lot of the people who bring these lawsuits, finding it insufferable that there are simple householders somewhere who dare to disagree with them and their enlightened progressivism.

It is for this reason that, as in so many areas, the law needs not so much to step in to protect people as to step out. Remove the easy pay-offs for discrimination from private business owners and householders. The fact of the matter is that as objectionable as you may find it, private citizens should be allowed to be as bigoted as they please on their own time, on their own property, and with their own money, just as long as they are prepared to suffer the economic and social consequences of doing so.

Stay tuned for part two

In The 1930s, Would He Be Accusing Us Of Fasciophobia?

I've got a couple other topics that I intended to talk about today, but the rantings of this unbearably pompous plastic-haired idiot demand a response. Although I am, as a rule, generally in favour of pomposity, being a determined practitioner myself, such overwhelming arrogance coming from such an intellectual peasant (hah! We'll see who's more pompous now, Olbermann; beat that phrase for arrogance) so prominently and disingenuously displaying his ignorance grates like nothing I have ever seen before.

I am not even talking here about Olbermann's embracing of that unhistorical myth of Tolerant Islamic Spain, which does not become any more true no matter how many times or with however much certainty it is repeated, or his emotive and--again--academically-wanting evocation of how this beacon of tolerance--actually more like the American South under Jim Crow, at best--was under attack from the mean and nasty Christians.

What I am talking about in particular is this infuriating and patently ridiculous comparison of those who oppose the fascistic aims of the jihadists today to those who supported Nazism in the 1930s. It is as if Olbermann had stood up against those who protested against Hitler and accused them of dangerous intolerance and fasciophobia. The support of the Islamist movement not just for fascistic and genocidal aims but actually for the moustachioed man himself (at 1:35 in this video clip and also here) should leave no doubt as to which side of the debate today's true anti-fascists are located.

Although I personally find it doubtful, it is just possible that Imam Faisal and his Cordoba Initiative are genuinely committed to interfaith dialogue, peace, and coexistence. If that is indeed the case, they are guilty of nothing more than incredible tastelessness and a massive misjudgement of the American public, many of whom, entirely understandably, view this as an act of Islamic triumphalism. If any of Faisal's numerous purported links to the Muslim Brotherhood are genuine, Americans are correct to view it as such. It is also doubtful that the Middle Eastern money which is being donated to build this Islamic Centre is being donated in the name of 'interfaith dialogue.'

The fact is that as frustrating as it might be to any Muslims who mean only good, non-Muslims have earned the right to be suspicious of possible duplicity and doublespeak. For example, there is no question that every Muslim in the world is in agreement that Islam forbids the killing of innocent people, and will state that outright. But some will, when pressed, point out that (to showcase one particular way this can be reasoned), as they understand it, if you are not a Muslim, you have committed a crime against God, and are therefore 'guilty' as in this infamous video of a similarly infamous individual. Obviously, this need to clarify will be frustrating and possibly seem insulting to any Muslim who genuinely believes that Islam forbids the killing of innocent people as we define them in the modern West, but the need for such clarity has been proven time and time again as Islamic scholars who Western governments and organisations have held up as moderate voices have time and time again been revealed to support everything from outright terrorism to the imposition, even if through political means, of oppressive Islamic law.

Imam Faisal himself, the mastermind of the project at issue, warrants further scrutiny, if nothing else, for the claims he has made about the U.S. government's responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, and his refusal to take the very basic step of condemning Hamas, an organisation whose founding documents, available here (scroll down for the full text), state quite clearly that their movement renounces forever any accommodation or even dialogue with Israel, and endorses the idea that the 'Zionist' plan is to conquer the whole Middle East, as set out, so they say, in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic forgery which also details how the Jews drink the blood of non-Jewish children. This is not just some museum relic either, irrelevant to the Hamas of today. Hamas-produced children's TV programmes regularly educate the young on the need to kill all the Jews--not the Zionists, or the Israelis, or any other thing that would give them at least the option of arguing that it was a political message rather than a call to religious genocide of the people that the Hamas Channel (Al-Aqsa TV) refers to as 'the enemies of Allah' and 'apes and pigs.'

Condemning Hamas would seem to be the very basic first step for anyone who wants to work on dialogue and coexistence in that troubled region, as Imam Faisal has said he wishes to do.

From my personal study of Islam, in particular what it says about how to treat unbelievers, I find it hard to believe that people are capable of taking a positive message of peace, tolerance, respect, and coexistence out of either the Qu'ran itself or the example of Mohammed. However, I am willing to accept that some people do. I can hardly doubt it, having met a few of them in person, and having read pieces by a number of others. Far be it from me to attempt to dissuade them from this admirable conclusion. But what they, and a large number of non-Muslim leftists, need to realise, is that a whole lot of Muslims--almost certainly the majority of Muslim men world-wide, if not of women or those in the Western world--don't seem to agree with them, whether that be the wild-eyed Jihadi in a cave plotting to blow up a disco, or the generally decent man in Riyadh, who goes to work every day, cares about his duty as a husband and father, wants only the best for his family just like billions of people around the world do, and who nevertheless, in the same way that we take for granted the most basic things, such as that race is irrelevant to moral worth or that we won't be arrested for reading a newspaper, takes for granted the most basic things, such as that according to Islam the Jews are hated by God and that it would be completely unacceptable for his wife to leave the house without a male relative accompanying her. Just as it is unthinkable to us that we would prohibit someone by law from converting to Islam, so it is unthinkable to him that someone would be allowed to convert from Islam.

If even the majority of Muslims do not agree that Islam is a peaceful, tolerant, respectful, freedom-loving faith, as we understand those concepts in the West, how can non-Muslims be expected to conclude that it is those things? Sure, all Muslims are in agreement that Islam is good, but that is different from agreeing that it is something that non-Muslims would consider to be good and would be happy to welcome into their countries. Of the billion Muslims who praise Islamic tolerance, most will, by 'tolerance' mean that people of other religions are allowed to practice their religion under Islamic rule, provided they pay the jizya, don't proselytise, keep a suitably low profile, and otherwise humble themselves before Muslims, as it was in the 'Golden Age' of Islamic Spain. To them, this is as it should be, because although a limited tolerance is good, Islam, as the truth, should reign supreme. This however, is not the 'tolerance' that we praise and respect in the West, or mean when when we use the word.

Like it or not, and any truly moderate Muslim will not like it one bit, the actions of the al-Qaida terrorists who destroyed the Twin Towers were not so far outside of normal, mainstream Islamic thinking, either currently, or historically. The particularly modern Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood and its siblings and offshoots may be a relatively new phenomenon, but the broader Jihad is not.

Ultimately, the Jihad, as perpetrated by the enemies of our freedom and our way of life, is very real, and it is something that lovers of that freedom need to stand against, whether they think it is a false Jihad that goes against the teachings of Islam, and thus must be opposed, or whether they think it is in the finest tradition of an evil religion, and thus must be opposed.

But it will do none of us any good, especially not Islamic moderates, to deny that what those moderates mean by Islam is very different from what a lot of very powerful, very vocal, very numerous Muslims across the world mean by Islam, and that it is this other Islam, the one that talks at its most radical about killing infidels, but even at its most mild about placing all other religions below Islam in an ostensibly multi-faith society, that most people, Muslim and non-Muslim, are acquainted with, and that when a Muslim or a non-Muslim refers to 'Islam,' it is to this thoroughly unpleasant ideology, not to Islam as the genuine moderates understand it, that he is almost certainly referring. If moderate, or as the moderates themselves would put it, 'true' Islam, is to be welcomed in the West, it is not just Westerners that will have to be told about it, shown it, convinced of its status as the authentic form of the religion, it is, above all, Muslims.

Until they are convinced, there is not much point in the moderates trying to convince non-Muslim Westerners that the Muslim Brotherhood and their varied ilk do not represent Islam--there are too many Muslims willing to contradict them.

I'm Back! And The World Is Still Infuriating

It's interesting the sorts of things that can and cannot spur one to action, action being, in my case, the action of writing down words. This blog, intended as an archive for my musings and a vent for my outrage, has lain dormant for almost a year. I assure you that this has not been due to a lack of opinions, informed and otherwise, on my part, regarding all these tiresome events with which our world seems to be plagued.

I suppose what happened was that, in devoting my energies to other activities, I fell out of the habit of writing here. After I had gone a couple months, and missed commenting on some significant developments, it seemed inapropriate to recommence on a minor note. Instead, I felt that it was important to come back strong with a major observation on something of importance: the nature of the political spectrum, the concept of racism, the Clash of Civilisations, or something similarly weighty. All of these aforementioned 'major' articles exist in a changing variety of draft forms, have for the past year or so, and may do so for quite some time.

Because of this unfortunate trap, gradually the entire year slipped away. I even missed the general election, which, looking back, might have made for a suitably major reintroduction. The problem was that each individual election outrage was itself minor, and thus did not seem to be appropriate for the grand re-entrance I desired. More on that travesty of an election, and the issues arising from it, in later posts.

What has finally drawn me back is not the brave new Age of Compromise (replacing the Age of Change), nor the continued antics of Bunglin' Barry and Sideshow Joe, but rather a positively infuriating sub-headline in the Telegraph, which reveals just how far we are from sanity in our tolerance--in the name of cultural sensitivity--of thoroughly barbaric foreign practices.

The sub-headline at issue features in the online version of the article titled "France's interior minister targets immigrants who practice polygamy," and reads:

France's lurch to the right continued after Brice Hortefeux, the country's interior minister, called for immigrants who practice polygamy or female genital mutilation to have their citizenship withdrawn.

Does it strike anyone else as odd that cracking down on polygamy and female genital mutilation is considered a lurch to the right? Of course it shouldn't seem odd, not really, not to anyone who has been paying attention to the way we ostensibly on the right of politics have become virtually the sole voice speaking against the greatest single threat to personal--including sexual--freedom, in the world, the global Jihad.

This particular article emphasises more than anything not so much the threat to native Westerners but rather how the left has particularly thrown immigrant women under the bus in the name of 'tolerance' and 'cultural sensitivity,' terms whose bland cheerfulness seems increasingly obscene as you realise the types of activities they excuse. The feminist and sexual liberation movements, to their enduring shame, while spending an inordinate amount of resources picking up on the slightest, often invented, hints of sexism in mainstream Western society, have acquiesced in the locking out from the barest semblance of freedom and equality a significant and ever-increasing minority of women, who are forced to live under medieval laws, right here, in our own countries, with the connivance of the institutional left.

This goes even beyond the idiocy and cognitive dissonance involved when leftists advocate for their executioners abroad, such as in the case of the self-parody of an organisation which goes by the name Queers for Palestine, a place where gays are persecuted and killed with the force of law and broad social sanction. But advocating for their executioners here marks a new and dangerous low. Again and again, I have been shocked at how quickly outrageous parodies become commonplace news stories. This article, "ACLU defends Nazis' right to burn down ACLU headquarters" is one of my favourite articles from the satirical newspaper The Onion. Obviously, it's way over the top. But in the general gist, it captures perfectly and frighteningly how the left deals with the Jihadist threat. We must tolerate those who have not the slightest tolerance for us, our values, and our way of life, and increasingly, as with the disgusting phenomena of 'honour' killing and female genital mutilation, we are asked to tolerate not just hostility, but real, measurable harm done to our fellow citizens.

The left doesn't yet act as if the terrorists' rights to blow up our buses supersedes our right to life. But they dance frighteningly close to the idea that a man's right to murder his daughter for wanting to exercise her Western freedoms supersedes not just her right to do so, but also her right to life. That is the sort of thing you might laugh at in The Onion, but when you then see it on the BBC, it stops being funny pretty damn quickly.

Now It's News?

It seems to be a developing pattern in news commentary that all the nasty things that the left has been doing to conservatives and Republicans for years are "a worrying sign of debasement of political discourse in this country" only now that the ascendant Dems have had to face them themselves.

Take the complaints about speakers at these "town hall" meetings being shouted down. That sort of thing is uncivil, certainly, and being louder is no guarantee of being right. But lefties have been using volume, and in some cases force, rather than reason in the political arena for ages, and it was never even mentioned in the mainstream media with anything other than admiration for the spirit of those brave progressives. Now that Pelosi et al. have to face the same thing that they regularly unleashed on others, however, the whining is deafening.

In some cases you wonder if the writer denoucing this "new debasement" of discourse has actually had his head in the ground or is being deliberately misleading. This is the case with an article that I read just now in my cousin's local paper, "The Day" of New London in Connecticut. There are a number of things that really bother me about the article. First of all, the author--Tom Teepden--insists that he is taken aback by the comparasons of the president to Hitler currently popular among his opponents. After all, the Nazis represent an incalculable evil and the right should be ashamed of itself for bringing this into the nation's political discourse. In this sentiment he is joined by frequent star of this blog Leonard Pitts Jr., who has written a much similar column.

At first, the answer is obvious: Teepden must be deliberately sacrificing truth for his political goals. After all, there is no possible way that he could have missed the massive phenomenon of Bush/Hitler comparison. A number of choice sign examples are also available here (along with a lot of comparisons to Satan, although Churchill famously expressed ambivalence about which was worse). Or we have a lot of stuff like this, which all basically boil down to this.

I think it's safe to say that the "town hall" protesters aren't breaking any new ground here, if they're even doing it at all.

But some of the rest of what Teepden says leads me to believe that maybe he is genuinely so intellectually-challenged that he actually believes what he is saying. For example, take this comment from his article:

"For a while, this seemed puzzling. Just weeks ago any stab at universal medical coverage was denounced as socialist. Then suddenly health care reform was Nazism redux. But wasn't socialism always considered leftist and Nazism just about as far right as right could go?"

Is he actually citing the popular 21st Century conception of Nazism as an authority on the genuine content of Nazi ideology? It seems hard to believe, but I think he actually is. Of course, if he spent any time at all on the subject he would realise the innaplicability of the left-right political spectrum derived from the French Revolution to postmodernist ideologies such as Fascism, and that Nazism is composed of some elements that seem leftist, and some elements that seem rightist, but in reality has an intellectual genesis that is a revolt against that whole axis.

Instead of doing the most basic research, he chooses to to claim that:

"The Nazi Party was born and died a hard-right movement founded in, and run on, pathological anti-Semitism, racial purity and violence - a horrid Gotterdammerung of false gods preening. It was only the “national” in its name that ever counted."

This assessment--that part of it that can be deciphered into an intelligible thesis and isn't a confused Wagner reference--is so far from an accurate and complete description of Nazi ideology that it wouldn't even get him a good GCSE.

He does include a little blurb, gently worded and barely a few sentences long, which suggests that liberals (in the current American usage, I presume) might share a little of the blame for making Nazism a standard insult. In light of the links above, this is perhaps the understatement of the century.

It is easy to understand why the left, which has never been able to tolerate alternative viewpoints, should be in full panic mode when they finally become the target of mass public opposition. It is also clear why leftist columnists would try to paint their opponents as the creators of the uncivil discource that is their own great legacy.

The ongoing mystery is why papers give space to people who clearly have no clue what they are talking about.

This Man Confuses Me

About a month ago I wrote quite unfavourably about Leonard Pitts Jr., a Miami Herald columnist who appears in my local Seattle Times. As I explained, some of his articles were so full of outrageous statements and twisted, backward thinking, that it gave the impression he was living in an alternate universe.

It was all the more confusing then that he subsequently came out with an article that was fantastic, not just because of the clarity of the writing, but because of the striking lucidity of the thinking and, above all, the demonstration of admirable priorities. Well aware that, in the wake of the most recent sex scandal to hit a high-profile politician, there would be plenty of people denouncing the scandalous behaviour itself, he chose to focus on something arguably even more important and certainly much neglected: the appalling substitution of 'mistake' for 'bad decision' in public apologies.

I cannot but admire a man who can look past infidelity, dishonesty, and hypocrisy, and get really angry about abuse of the English language. That man has his priorities straight.

In fact, the only really serous problem I have with this article is that the mob he proposes be formed to drag these politicians from the podium would be perhaps more profitably equipped with torches and pitchforks rather than the lanterns he suggests.

He does also seem to misdiagnose the reason why the roll of politicians caught with their pants down is conspicuously lacking female members. Rather than "arrogance, recklessness, self-delusion and lack of foresight" being common to men and not to women, it seems to me to be a more compelling explanation that is is more typically male to consider sex to be reward for success, as it has been for males since before people walked upright. Yet this is again a minor point when compared to the overwhelming justice of his outrage.

I wish I had written that article. All I can ask you to do is read it. And maybe help me figure out what's up with this guy.