Cool...

Hube seems to have decided to become a bit of a Leftist on an issue (and I need the exercise).

Samples:
"SW: All gay people are self-destructive??"

Pretty standard boilerplate there, "gay people" were never defined in the first place but given that the issue was teenagers "coming out" and self-defining as gay it could easily be argued that all such acts are self-destructive because the Self is being said to be defined by disordered sexual desires which can be known to be destructive. As I began to note there, there are various lines of empirical evidence that indicate that such an act is inherently self-destructive in a psychological way to the Self. It is also possible to go into philosophic reasoning as to why the metaphysical Self is being destroyed by physical appetites, as Socrates argued if one decides to be defined by or ruled by their appetites then the true Self can actually become a slave to its own appetites.

"Nice. Equating being gay with robbery, drug use, murder and rape.

Unreal."

This is a denial of logical argument and a shift to emotional appeal. Not that there's anything wrong with emotional appeals, for the nicety of it! "You're a Big Meanie but I'm nice." is also fun. But back to basic logic: IF people choose behaviors that others find objectionable THEN an argument that is structured around the notion that people would not choose a behavior that people generally find objectionable is invalid.

I would play at being a Leftist more in order to play the Devil's advocate but it sometimes seems like there aren't enough Rightists to try to set things nice and straight.

Good essay, interesting comments

Why I'm pro-life, by Anonymous Opinion

A comment on the last comment:

[P]arents...should be informed of what is going on with a child's health for many reasons. (18 and 13, a 5 year difference, is still slightly grey to me, just because the 18 year old may not know any better or they may have been dating or friends throughout middle/high school) On the other hand [As if his Right side isn't already blurred enough, here comes the hand that's left! This ought to be good.] if she can't go to her parents and di[s]cuss this, then there may be other problems; problems that we are not privy to due to confidentiality or because the girl didn't want to explain. I don't look at it as a cover-up, I look at it as a very delicate situation that they handled one way instead of another.

I.e. the wrong way. Because if they didn't handle it and take it in hand the right way (It's hard to handle things the right way with a limp right hand, after all!) then they probably settled into the wrong ways typical to the sinister Leftist mind and followed the left-handed path to the ways of the occult/hidden. It seems that the sinister is often hidden/occluded NOW in modern times by talk of privacy. Apparently pagans these days would maintain that they're not hiding because they do evil and only do so because they have a "right" to privacy that can hide what they agree is wrong...which seems right to them or somethin'.

More on right and wrong, rights which seem wrong and wrongs which seem alright:

If the parents aren't involved in their 13 year old's life to know that their daughter is having sex with someone significantly older, then I'm not sure how much right the parent's have to interfere anyway. If the doctor really did suspect something wrong then he should have (and would have) notified the authorities. This needs to be a case by case assessment.

It's interesting how the Leftist mind can justify itself based on how right society must be based on social justice defined by the general will or moral relativism based on supposed groups of people, yet it often rejects society or culture as the arbiter of what is right if society has gone against its left-hand way of indiscriminate blurring.

One of the few things that those who tend to seek a lack of judgment are willing to judge is the recognition of basic natural categories. So the recognition of the distinctions between categories such as child and adult, male and female, life and death and so on tend to draw out the Leftist mind to make the only type of judgment it makes, which is judging judgment. In this case it is illegal for a man (adult) to have sex with a thirteen year old (child) because the people have indeed made a judgment based on basic categories that they expect to be applied as a general law and not left to the decision of men on a case by case basis and so on. There are various lines of evidence that indicate that many abortionists do not care for or love the young women or girls on which they operate, so it is little wonder that evidence shows that they tend to help other men abuse girls, on a case by case basis. It's in the interests of child abusers to blur the distinction between child and adult, which is why the American people have made laws that are supposed to be generally applicable in order to uphold such distinctions. Basic natural categories exist objectively but civilized people still have to recognize them in order to maintain their civilization. Civilization rests on language, which rests on definition, which rests on basic generalizations and associations, which the Leftist mind tends to more and more actively reject as it emerges from the decadence and decline of civilization. American civilization is on the decline, so the recognition of basic natural categories is becoming blurred and so on. You can choose just about any basic natural category and advance lines of evidence in this respect. For instance the distinction between child and adult: American civilization has beauty pageants in which children pretend to be more adult while American adults have plastic surgery because they idolize youth, because of the blurring that goes on neither can actually be what they in fact are by their nature. Michael Jackson is not actually a child, yet he isn't really an adult either, thus his perversion. Children are denied their childhood because they cannot be what they are by nature in any decadent civilization, instead perversion is the rule.

Oh well, I still tend to think that the American Empire has hundreds of years left in it before the barbarians at the gates overtake it thanks to a combination of its own decadence, corruption, geopolitics and the usual things that seem to bring down a hegemonic power. It's interesting how any attempt to analyze civilization reads as a polemic, probably because language naturally calls us back to distinctions that we already know and since we've usually gone pretty far towards decadence, language naturally makes war on our state of being. It's likely that any higher form of language is ultimately based on the Word or Logos through which all things were formed, and so from which all things degenerate away from or reform and regenerate by. The Bible notes its polemical nature: "For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart." Hebrews 4:12 Christians these days tend to focus on the Word of God as the Bible itself, yet according to the Bible itself the Word or Information through which all things were created, formed and keep their form has to do with much more than the Bible itself.

National Socialism vs. Christianity

A few excerpts from a historical source that I mentioned a few posts down:

[I]t is obvious that, although the position of the Christian churches in Germany is in many respects quite precarious, as every newspaper-reader knows, the churches still carry on their work. On the basis of past Christian experience, it is permissible to assume that, however difficult the present plight of these churches may be, they will outlast the Nazi movement. There can be no doubt that, consciously or unconsciously, many church leaders, Protestants and Catholics alike, are trying to formulate their programs of action in line with this expectation. But even so, they do not escape the immediate necessity of facing the actuality of National Socialism. The longer this movement persists, the more impossible neutral attitudes become. Hence the influence of those who take clear-cut positions, either negative or positive, becomes more and more important.
[...]
[A Christian anti-Nazi] argument runs as follows: The church is a community of “people who have found in Jesus Christ their own comfort and hope and the comfort and hope of the whole world” and who therefore can do no other than bear witness before the world to Jesus Christ. This witnessing to Jesus Christ involves two things: the church of today must join in the confession of the prophets and apostles and the church in all ages that Jesus Christ as the revealer of God is the Lord. The church of today must also “actualize this confession in relation to those contemporary questions which agitate the church and the world.” It must speak a definite “Yes” or “No” in making a decision from its faith about the events of the day. “The political problem of our day” is the problem of National Socialism. Its “double character as a political experiment and as a religious institution of salvation shuts out any possibility of dealing with the question it puts ‘only’ as a political question and not, indirectly and directly, as a question of faith as well. Consequently, in no event can the church adopt a neutral attitude to the political problem of today.” National Socialism cannot be understood unless it is seen “as a new Islam, its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s prophet.” It is a church, although a very secular one, of which to be a member means to affirm its principles “in the form of faith, of mysticism and fanaticism.” If it exhibits, therefore, “all the characteristics of an ‘anti- church’ fundamentally hostile to Christianity,” then it must become evident, by the way in which the church of Jesus Christ confesses its faith, that the Christian rule of faith and life and the National Socialist rule of faith and life are mutually exclusive. No peace is possible between confessing to Jesus Christ and accepting the sovereignty of National Socialism. It follows, then, that “the church may and should pray for the suppression and casting out of National Socialism, just in the same sense as in former times and when confronted by a similar danger she prayed for the ‘destruction of the bulwarks of the false prophet Mohammed.’”
This argument formed the basic content of a lecture by Barth before a meeting of the Swiss Evangelical Organization of Help for the Confessional Church in Germany on December 5, 1938. It was therefore presented in support of the Confessional churches of Germany, whose fight for the independence of the church from Nazi politics and Nazi views has attracted the attention of the entire world. When still a professor in Germany, Karl Barth was one of their leaders. Evidently, he still looks upon them as that body of Christians who must bear the brunt of the conflict between Christianity and National Socialism. In spite of the heroic resistance of the Confessional churches to the Nazi regime, it can hardly be said that they have dared to state their case as bluntly as Barth has done.

(National Socialism and Christianity: Can They Be Reconciled?
by Wilhelm Pauck
The Journal of Religion, Vol. 20, No. 1. (Jan., 1940), pp. 15-17)

It's interesting to me how moral relativists tend to view Nazism in "absolute" or defined terms and structure their arguments accordingly. I.e. "Only fascists are intolerant enough to view things as right and wrong so people who believe that things are right and wrong are like fascists or somethin', which means that they're absolutely wrong." Given moral relativism it is not exactly clear how we can assume that people living in the culture of Germany were wrong to support Nazism because Nazism came to be their culture and supposedly morality is relative to culture because it is merely an artifact or creation of culture as is indicated by the fact that it varies from culture to culture.

It seems to me that people do not apply moral relativism to Nazism (while at the same time they tend to in the case of Islamic culture) because the Allies so thoroughly crushed Nazism that there are not millions of "nice Nazis" around to allow relativists to hide among all the Nice People instead of dealing with the ideas and civilization at issue. After all, no matter the depth of the evil that overtakes a culture or civilization there is always a mass of nice people who tacitly go along with things because the mass of men generally isn't interested in seeking or standing for self-evident truths as they usually just want to live well, eat well, have some sex, get married, etc. Critics of evil civilizations are often responded to with: "If this type of civilization is so evil then how can there be so many nice people who live in it? Huh, huh? I know some nice people, for the tolerance of me!" Etc. All I would note of that is that of course people generally seem nice...until they aren't.

Note how politically incorrect it is to directly criticize Islam the way the Confessing church did, although it would be difficult to point out a way in which their criticism was intellectually or theologically incorrect on Christian terms. It seems to me that the anti-Nazi pastors were correct to point out similar forms of cultural evil because no matter how different the cultural history that evil slithers through it seems to come to the same basic ends. The main one: "The Jews must be killed."

Interesting to note that similar interests were recognized by Islamic clerics and Nazis at the time. For exampe, a leader who helped create the Palestinian Arab cause and the pattern of "The Jews must be killed. Hey, the Jews just tried to kill me! So you see why the Jews must die." Etc. Example:

The rise of Hitler to power in 1933 marked a turning point in the new mufti's activities. He sent a cable of congratulations to the Nazi leader and expressed support for the Jewish boycott in Germany. In doing so, Haj Amin was merely responding to a widespread sentiment among Muslims in general and Arabs in particular. Indeed, the German dictator was seeking revenge against the British and the French, two dominant infidel intruders in the Muslim world. He could also be an ally against the Jews in Palestine. Accustomed to their own authoritarian regemes, Muslims were not bothered by Hitler's repressive and antidemocractic policies.

(The Broken Crescent: The "Threat" of Militant Islamic Fundamentalism
by Fereydoun Hoveyda :10)

The evolution of creation

A geneticist notes some important facts about what has been and can be observed empirically as opposed to stories that are imagined about the past:

My primary objection as a geneticist [to the grand genetic narrative of Evolution] was to the claim that the formation of races, or microevolution, as it is often referred to, is a small scale example of macroevolution - the origin of species. Race formation is, of course, very well documented. All it requires is isolation of a part of a population. After a few generations, due to natural selection and genetic drift, the isolated population will irreversibly lose some genes, and thus, as long as the isolation continues, in some features it will be different from the population it arose from. In fact, we do this ourselves all the time when breeding, substituting natural with artificial selection and creating artificial barriers to generative mixing outside the domesticated conditions.

The important thing to remember here is that a race is genetically impoverished relative to the whole population. It has fewer alleles (forms of genes). Some of them are arranged into special, interesting, rare combinations. This is particularly achieved by guided recombination of selected forms in breeding work. But these selected forms are less variable (less polymorphic). Thus what is referred to as micro-evolution represents natural or artificial reduction of the gene pool. You will not get Evolution that way. Evolution means construction of new genes. It means increase in the amount of genetic information, and not reduction of it.

--Maciej Giertych, full text available at Uncommon Descent

I'm back.

I'll probably write a little more on the last post tomorrow. (I wrote a few more comments on it here already.)

Moronic

I'm only writing this because I couldn't sleep.

A Delawarean's attempt at what passes for "intellectual scrutiny" among most Delawareans:

Here's what I am talking about regarding the danger of religion and religious hypocrisy. From today's headlines...

You've heard of IslamaFascists - I think we now have Christian fascists. What is the definition of a fascist? Not only do they want to beat you, but they want to destroy you in the process... if things keep going the way things are going locally and statewide, it is going to be more and more difficult for Republicans to recruit candidates. We have elements of the party who are moral absolutists, who take the approach that if you don't take my position every step of the way, not only will I not support you, but I will destroy you.

Steve Salem, Republican Chairman, Woodbury County, IA.

This is what you get when you base your moral decisions and political positions on some incoherent, error riddled manuscript from antiquity that does not even hold up to the slightest intellectual scrutiny.

Delawhere

All definition breaks down at some point but the most accurate and succinct definition of fascism that I've read defines it as a practical and violent resistance to transcendence. Ironically, fascism is now used as a synonym for evil by those who tend to believe in fascist philosophy because fascist arguments rely on cultural associations and propagandistic imagery and tend to reject any attempt to seek transcendent or "absolute" truths. (E.g., "Good and evil are antiquated words because we now know that morality is relative to culture and if you disagree with me then you're like a fascist or somethin', which seems pretty evil!") To a fascist the only truth that exists is cultural, biological and often more importantly political. The fascist mind tends to believe that their incorrect philosophical assumptions define science itself so it sometimes conflates its degenerate philosophy with science, especially biology. Given the original assumption of relativism if cultural or biological changes do take place then all truth has been changed or shifted because the truth is relative to the mutable things that supposedly define it at any given moment. This is why a fascist tends to be a rather pragmatic creature of politics and propaganda, as they believe that if they establish a view as politically correct then it is becoming morally correct. If morality were actually "relative to culture" then they would be correct, in so far as anyone could be correct when people are dumb enough to assume that the notion of relativity can exist without a frame of reference based in values by which relationships and relativity can be judged. I.e. Einstein's theory of relativity would break down if the speed of light did not act as a hidden absolute by which relationships could be measured with numerical values. The same applies to moral values that are written in legal codes as applies to mathematical values encoded in theories, just because we do not understand or know what the ultimate absolutes are does not mean that they do not exist or should not be sought as far as we are able.

As far as fascism, it seems that there are layers of irony that come up these days. E.g. "[Fascism] is what you get when you base your moral decisions and political positions on some incoherent, error riddled manuscript from antiquity..." Yet for some reason Nazis demanded the "immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany." cf. (The Rise and Fall of the
Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
By William Shirer :237)

The Nazis believed the Bible to be nothing more than a book written by "wandering goatherders" which contained the "fairytales of the Jews" and so on, most believed that they were merely applying science and biology to politics. Similarly, progressives tend to believe that if they are successful in incrementally "separating" religious traditions from politics then supposedly science will somehow lead to "progress" on its own. This view rests on an abject ignorance of the history of science in general and a perversion of the providential view of "progress" of the sort that the American Founders believed in. Science or some form of systematic/mathematic study of Nature does not necessarily lead to progress, in fact there is no way of judging progress if one assumes that numerical values are the only values that matter. Of course matter will matter when it is set in motion, as a matter of course, yet there are also values that can guide the course of matter and that must sit in judgment upon its course. It's a lie to pretend that we can have values without acts of judgment.

As Karl Kraus said of "progress" in proto-Nazi times, "Progress will make purses of human skin." (Half-Truths and
One-and-a-Half-Truths)

I'll probably write some more on this when I get back. Here's a good source on the notion of "Christian fascists":
(National Socialism and Christianity: Can They Be Reconciled?
by Wilhelm Pauck
The Journal of Religion, Vol. 20, No. 1. (Jan., 1940), pp. 15-32)

No updates...

I'm going to Gulfport for a week so don't check the blog for new posts.

I doubt there's much internet access there.

Later.

Down With Absolutes

Apparently I can load Down With Absolutes again. It's about local politics now. Other than attempting to analyze the Leftist psychosis of a candidate like Michael Berg I'm not interested in writing much on local politics.

It seems to me that Christine O'donnell is the only candidate worth voting for, no surprise there. I'm not sure why she's a write in candidate but basically all you have to do is select "write in" on the voting machine and write her name in the spot provided.

The rest of it is low level politics: "If you vote for my opponent then you may as well be voting for a pedophile!" Etc. (What kind of a name is Beau, anyway?)

Shadow Company

Shadow Company (2006)

This was an interesting movie about modern mercenaries. They are now known as "security consultants," "private contractors," "private security company" and so on but they are basically mercenaries. Although the word mercenary shares roots with anything from mercy to merchandise, it has negative connotations because a "mercenary" works for a wage while a soldier is serving their country. An interesting fact that this film illustrates is that soldiers really are "serving" their country because they're not getting paid what their service is actually worth on the free market.

According to the film it costs about $25,000 a month to have a soldier in Iraq but I doubt that the soldier sees all that much of it. In contrast, a mercenary in the film said that some of them are getting as much as $1,000 a day. I would assume that is for high risk work and may also be an exaggeration. But I know that there are security consultants who train the US military who have relatively safe jobs that are paid well. As a soldier told me, if a husband and wife who both served in the military went back to Iraq as security consultants they could both very easily make $80,000 a year to have a combined salary of $160,000.

At any rate, American soldiers should be thanked for service to their country because they have often followed the example of Christ by serving others with little expectation of material/economic rewards. That is to say, "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."
John 15:13