Stand with the heroes, Fight the zeros!

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Bonfire of the Insanities


A photographer caught some wannabe jihadi jackwagon throwing rocks at the police and vandalizing property in Oakland while wearing a Palestinian-style keffiyeh.





Idiot's Intifada 

This just reinforces the stereotype of the "We are the World" American wacktivist wankers, imitating what they see on CNN, too lazy and too cowardly to put it on the line like Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and others on the left did back in the 1930's.

The Socialists of the 1930's went to Spain and fought the fascists; today's leftists bleat on about the Palestinians, Colombian campesinos and oppressive Middle Eastern regimes, but they don't do anything about them.

Like a twisted Civil War reenactment club, they instead dress up as hippies and don costumes of their favorite radicals, and assault their urban environs with fantasies of Latin American Revolutions and Arab Springs dancing through their fluffy little brains.  Until the dingbat in the Palestinian headscarf heads to Gaza and starts throwing rocks at Israeli tanks, he's just another pantywaist playing dress up.

Latte Leftists

Our pampered populists are latte leftists playing dress-up, too scared to go fight any real oppression. So instead, they attack the America that swaddles them in comfort and modern bounty.  They trash the municipalities that host cell phone towers and free WiFi for their iPhones and laptops.  The disciplined and humane police forces provide additional incentive to protest here instead of abroad. Instead of being thrown head first into a fetid, dank gulag bloody and broken, they are escorted into a bright clean cell where they can sip publicly funded hot coco until a communist party lawyer, pockets stuffed with wealthy liberals' guilt money, comes down to bail them out.

Rage Against the Reagan Revolution


This is not about fighting oppression. This is the left's poop throwing primal scream against the greatest president of the 20th century and his lifting half a billion people out of poverty.

Three decades later, the triumph of Reaganism is remarkable. In the United States and Britain taxes shrank, regulation, especially of the financial sector, was pruned back, and state companies were sold off. Even Brussels was nudged toward liberalization.
The impact on the rest of the world was even more profound. Soviet Communism collapsed, China converted to capitalism and entered the world economy, India dismantled its protectionist License Raj, and many emerging market economies in Latin America and Africa embraced liberalization as the path to growth.
One result has been an unprecedented global economic boom. Its biggest beneficiaries have been some of the world’s poorest people, particularly in China and India: Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion of the World Bank have found that between 1981 and 2005, the number of people living in poverty in the developing world fell by 500 million. (Chrystia Freeland)
The screaming OWS drum beaters are frustrated because the tea parties already have the anti-crony crapitalism turf staked out...
Palin’s remedy to crony capitalism is to double down on the Reagan Revolution — lower taxes and shrink government further. Progressives have not yet come up with a solution of such seductive simplicity. Their standard prescription — higher taxes, more regulation, a stronger social welfare net, and more investment in education — may be sensible. But it lacks the rallying power of Palin’s call to smash crony capitalism by depriving the elites of their political tool — big government.  (Chrystia Freeland)
Freeland sneeringly calls the separation of Wall Street and State "seductive simplicity," but that is the key to pulling our economy and our federal budget out of the crony crapitalist quagmire.  The "standard prescription" of the progressives will only exacerbate our economic misery by encouraging even more state-sponsored crony crapitalism.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Cheap Orwellian Tricks


My last post on Orwell and speech codes really struck a nerve with our leftist friend Ducky. Here’s my favorite comment from him, a piece of rhetoric I call an unsolicited Tu Quoque:



Let's see, we could spends days discussing phrases the right has deployed such as "weapons of mass destruction" or "the liberal media".
The right in general isn't interested in any precise use of language.
Merely say "sharia" and you bark like freaking trained seals.
Sorry, Silverfiddle, but you don't often find the real hard core right capable of moving past a few canned memes.
How about the left’s use of “assault weapon,” “Rabies Radio,” “Faux News," “blood for oil” (only when a Republican is in the White House)…  But I digress. Ducky is engaging in a misdirect Tu Quoque, avoiding the main point and shouting “Waaaah! Conservatives do it too!”  Which responds to nothing, because I never claimed otherwise, but I’m sure Orwell would be impressed with the intellectual depth of Ducky’s rebuttal.

I grant him that many Americans do get into a lather at the mention of Sharia, but it’s warranted.

We have nice looking westernized Imams assuring us that Islam is a religion of peace and Sharia is as innocuous and fluffy as a basket of kittens. Meanwhile, foaming-at-the-mouth Islamists kill infidels on the streets, burn down embassies and behead Jewish reporters, all in the name of Islam.  We've even had a few "honor" killing here in the good ol' US of A.

Perhaps they are abusing the religion and abusing the terms Jihad and Sharia, but actions speak louder than words. I think a reasonable person could excuse other reasonable people the natural tendency to give more weight to loud and violent acts than they do to calmly spoken rhetoric. Actions speak for themselves, words are just easy inventions.

Language (and Image) Abuse:  All sides do it

Ducky complains of the use of certain words as code-speech or quick labels to manipulate the masses or cast shorthand opprobrium on a person or group, and I agree with him. Shorthand is convenient. Imagine having to give a citation-laden dissertation every time you spoke. But it also allows speakers and listeners to lapse into lazy, well-grooved modes of thought, so yes, critical thinking is a must.

And then, as if on cue, Jersey stepped in with this banal piece of propaganda...
When you look at the voter and immigration laws being passed in the South, and the impetus from the Tea Party to make those laws, that if proof of the culture of racism in the Tea Party. When you look at their insanely hyperbolic caricatures of Obama, from the very beginning, that is proof of racism in the Tea Party.

[…] bla bla bla […]

… the drug war is racist, our immigration policies are racist, our foreign policies are racist.

Racism remains a very serious problem in America, and most of it comes from the Right.
That statement took zero thought. Grab the words from the propaganda library and go.  You could build a 99 cent lib-speak iPhone app to come up with that!

"A wathscally wightwing wathist behind evwy twee! And behind evwy government powicy!"

Note the imperious tone and the declaration of finality Jersey uses. A big, wet clot of unsubstantiated twaddle and logical fallacies, wadded up and thrown in our faces as he admonishes us to shut our gobs!
There's no arguing that. That's not "newsspeak" or "codespeak" or a "dog whistle." It is reality.  Anyone who says otherwise deluded, ignorant, or a liar. Period.
“There’s no arguing that!” Got it? Jersey’s style conjures visions of a fat, balding liberal Archie Bunker, pontificating from his ratty recliner wearing a spaghetti-stained wife beater and jabbing his lit cigar at you for emphasis. “There’s no arguing!” “Got that?” “Period!”

Orwell explains this in more detail in his essay Politics and the English Language. I recommend you take a few minutes and read it.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.

In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
I think left, right and middle can all agree on that.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Speech Codes are Thought Codes

I caught a bit of Rush's Weekend in Review, and he was playing excerpts of some guy on msnbc, can't remember his name, who was breaking down the conservative counterattacks responding to the left's assaults on Herman Cain.

In a picture-perfect example of psychological projection, this young man with one name succinctly and brilliantly accused the right of employing the politically-correct left's favorite tactic:  Marginalize your ideological opponents, putting them beyond the societal pale, so you do not have to engage them in debate.

That's what a charge of racism is all about.  Rightwing tea partiers are all racists, so their ideas can all be ignored.  They're not worthy of a response.  It's a convenient dodge employed by the ideologically indoctrinated and the intellectually bereft.

"Those who control the language control the debate."

Imposing speech codes, placing certain words off-limits, and declaring as "hate speech" the legitimate criticism of certain protected groups and programs are common contemporary versions of the age-old tactics Orwell warned us of so many years ago. 

He expounded upon Oceania's peculiar language, Newspeak, in a short essay, The Principles of Newspeak:
The purpose of Newspeak was [...] to make all other modes of thought impossible.
This involved "stripping" words of "unorthodox meanings," "eliminating undesirable words" and reducing the vocabulary.
Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought.
In our own day, "racist" is a lazy epithet to be flung only at white conservatives.  Employ it in any other fashion not authorized by the cognoscenti, and the author will be met with either puzzlement or scorn.  You may as well call a cockroach a house slipper.  People of color (and the guilty white liberals who encourage such dangerous linguistic abuse) cannot.  Be.  Racist.  Period.

In the same vein, the word fascism cannot be used without causing an indignant uproar, even if the one using it can provide ten reasons and examples showing why the word is apt.  And God forbid you should criticize the collapsing panoply of federally-funded social services that have ushered us to the brink of bankruptcy.  That would make you a hater of minorities, the poor, and old people.

Thought corrupts language, language corrupts thought

In his essay, Politics and the English Language, Orwell observes...
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
[...]  But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.
Successful speech codes create a self-censoring feedback loop.  Taking away words is the removal of the building blocks of thought, impoverishing it, which in turn further impoverishes our speech, which further impoverishes our thoughts...

We can break this cycle of language abuse by refusing to obey speech codes and fighting their implementation at every level.  Laughing in the faces of hollow ideologues spouting the latest liberal meme won't stop it, but it will break the spell and attract critical attention that is the antidote to pseudo-intellectual claptrap designed to quash critical thought and free speech.

* - I found the "control the debate" quote in Google Books - Disciplining Dissent - Bruneau & Turk

Friday, November 4, 2011

Have Women Lost Their Civilizing Influence?


I stumbled across a provocative article entitled, Why Polygamy is Good for Women. I enjoy a good counterintuitive argument, so I dove in…
A lot of the knee-jerk reactions against polygyny are from people who can't add up. In a society with equal numbers of men and women, each man with four wives gives women the additional pick of three men […]

In the Sahel region of Africa, half of all women live in polygynous households. The other half have a good choice of men and a lot more bargaining power.
(Tim Harford - Slate)
Could the same logic apply in the US? 

Large numbers of incarcerated males decrease the prospects for women. Add in that women as a cohort are more educated than men, and the disparity grows.

Most importantly, given shifting societal norms, does any of this even matter?

Women tightly guarding the gateway to carnal paradise has been the traditional means of putting respectable men in the marrying mood, but girl power has wrecked that.

In many circles, the girls compete with the guys to see who can be more promiscuous, to the detriment of themselves and their sisters, I think. It’s too easy to get free milk now, so only a fool buys the cow…

And with more and more girls willing to engage in public drunkenness, farting contests, and licentious vulgarities, crass behavior is no longer the exclusive domain of the male species.

Add to this the overall pornification of our society, and the female of the species has lost her mystique. Counterintuitively, psychologists believe this may explain why more men have retreated into internet porn and lap dances. Reality makes no sense so you gotta go hide somewhere, I guess.

What happens when your internal wiring is incompatible with the culture? 

I don’t know myself. I’ve been happily married for quite awhile, and God has blessed us with a pretty uncomplicated relationship. We simply and unselfishly try to make one another happy, and that’s important for a healthy marriage.

Driving home last week, I heard Dennis Prager discuss with callers what made their marriage a happy one. Almost every caller mentioned some variant of “doing something for or with my spouse that I really don’t want to do,” and much of it revolved around sex, with the man as the one wanting it when the wife was not particularly in the mood. It was a tie in with the question of why men cheat on their wives. 

Love as a Two-Sided Coin

Prager then presented a two-sided coin that sparked a lot of conversation:

For the women: Is it really so horrible to contribute 15 minutes to an activity that makes your spouse so happy and that may prevent him from sinning against you, your God, and your marriage?

For the Men: Is a few moments of adulterous pleasure really worth defiling your marriage, disrespecting your spouse, and offending your God?

Of course, the answer to both is, No. But we are irrational beings much of the time; and the whirling vortex of id, ego, emotions and sex leads to dark psychological chasms.

Let’s face it, were it not for sex, men would have no interest in women, and subsequently children. We men would abandon our towns and cities to roam the woods and mountains in armed bands, killing game, fighting, and brewing beer.

Idealizing women is not a condescension, and it is a shame that a small dedicated band of insurgents has succeeded in knocking themselves and their sisters from their pedestals.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Muslims Immigration: Even Open-Minded People Think it's a Bad Idea

This is a reprint from 2009.  I thought I'd run it since my last post on Islam in America got such a response.  As AOW concluded, immigration policy is something we can and must get control of.  Stop importing people who hate us and who have a history of spawning children who will grow up here and end up hating us... --Silverfiddle

** Unhinged DeviledEgg Rant Alert! ** 

If the thought of an "honor killing" on American soil doesn't disgust you and make you boil with patriotic rage, you're brain dead! 

I live in Europe, I've lived in North America, and I've lived in that armpit they call the Middle East. No contest which I think is better!

Close The Damned Gates!

Why the hell do Western nations continue to allow these troublemaking Muslims to immigrate? Look at a map.  Wherever there's trouble, angry turbaned men with beards are involved.

Our cultures are incompatible.  We enjoy pork bbq and beer, use toilet paper and refrain from female genital mutilation, for example.

Many Muslim immigrants refuse to assimilate, and the only way to have peace here in the West is to give in to their fleck spittled agitations at the expense of our cultural norms.  Not while I have breath in my body!  Better to close the gates!

ISLAM IS A RELIGION OF PEACE!!! DISAGREE AND I'LL KEEEEL YOU!!!

Unlike the DeviledEgg, foreign editor of The Australian Greg Sheridan is no xenophobe, but he declares, "Uncontrolled Muslim Influx a Threat to the West."
It is extremely difficult to talk honestly about Muslim immigration. All generalisations about it are subject to countless exceptions. Muslims are very different from each other.
Most are reasonably successful. But a much bigger minority end up with social, political, extremist or other problems resulting from a lack of integration than is the case with any other cohort of immigrants in Western societies. A lack of honest discussion about this results in bad policy.
He goes on to recommend a book by Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.

Jacob Laksin at City Journal recommends the book as well.
Polls show that some 70 percent of Britons believe that there are too many immigrants in their country. Majorities throughout Western Europe agree, and Muslim immigrants in particular are viewed with suspicion.
Europe is a Benignly Racist Continent
 
Despite the finger-wagging at America, many Europeans are fundamentally and unconsciously racist and insular. Here in Germany, people from the next village over are considered outsiders, fellow German speakers from Austria are treated as the enemy, and those who hail from farther afield have no hope of ever fitting in in the land of beer and bratwurst. 

Europeans are in a jam, trying to steer a course between the Charybdis of bigotry and the Scylla of cultural destruction. Worse, the entire continent is in denial. Muslims are to blame as well, especially when they display open contempt for their new home:
Yet the immigrants themselves are far from faultless. One of the immigration debate’s inconvenient truths is that Muslim immigrants have been so difficult to assimilate into European societies because they’re unwilling: many Muslims simply choose religious ties over national loyalties.
... 31 percent of British Muslims felt they had more in common with the people of Muslim nations than with their fellow Europeans.
I hope the US can learn the right lessons from Europe's immigration debacle. Reading Caldwell's book would be a good start, but cutting off all Muslim immigration is imperative.

I've got to stop now, that guy shouting from the tower is giving me a headache!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The DeviledEgg is prone to unhinged rants, childish outbursts, and fits of anger, but he's really a good egg once you get to know him. He is half German and half American and splits his time between the two countries. Western Hero is proud to add him to the team.

City Journal - Jacob Laksin
RCP - Greg Sheridan

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Afghanistan is not Colombia

Neocons will happily watch others pay any price and bear any burden...

This article caught my eye…
Plan Afghanistan
Why the Colombia model -- even if it means drug war and armed rebellion -- is the best chance for U.S. success in Central Asia.

Strange though it may sound, success in Afghanistan would look a lot more like the success that has been achieved in Colombia over the last 10 years, rather than the success that we are hoping for in Iraq.  (FP – Plan Afghanistan)
The "Experts" are Wrong

Every now and then I stumble across “experts” discussing issues that I have unique insight into. This is one of them. I’ve deployed to Afghanistan and I’ve deployed to Colombia, so I know what I’m talking about here. To put it bluntly, Paul Wolfowitz and Michael O'Hanlon are full of shit and nobody in their right mind should listen to them.

Afghanistan is not Colombia, and what worked in Colombia will not work in Afghanistan, for a host of reasons.

The Colombian conflict, sparked by “El Bogotazo” back in 1948, eventually spawned the armed communist rebel organization known as FARC. Through all of the violence, Colombia has continued to be an intact country, and has a rich history of democratic republicanism going back to the early 1800’s.   Afghanistan has never been more than a loose confederation of heterogeneous peoples with little loyalty outside family and tribe.

Afghanistan’s many factions suffer from a paucity of shared institutions and values


Tribal rule and Sharia reign over this variegated patchwork of peoples. It is a Hobbesian nightmare of chaos and misery where life is nasty, brutish and short. In stark contrast, Colombia enjoys a tradition of western civilization, European jurisprudence and republican democracy that binds the country’s fairly homogenous population. The fact that Colombia has remained intact, and even thrived, as the FARC continues to melt deeper into the jungle, a whimpering shadow of its former self, makes these factors I mention self-evident.

Colombia has a serious government supported by patriotic citizens who are determined to defeat their common enemy

Indeed, with Colombia, we are aiding a central government fighting a rebel band that had lost the sympathy of the poor people they were supposedly fighting for. Even leftist sympathizers in other Latin American countries no longer give this ragtag band of kidnappers and drug dealers solidarity shout outs.

Unlike kleptocratic Afghanistan and its multifarious mistrustful factions, Colombia has enough honest politicians, judges, military and police willing to lay it on the line for the love of their nation, and the success they’ve enjoyed over the past 30 years in breaking the cartels and attriting FARC gives testament to that. Afghanistan is a sinkhole of corruption, with no one willing to give it up for a Greater Afghan Nation. Colombians do their own fighting; Afghan soldiers and policemen let us do their fighting for them, and shoot at us every chance they get.

Bogota is a peaceful city; Kabul is not… 

I could go on and on, but you must see my point by now. The Colombian people have a unity of purpose and a shared love of country and respect for her institutions that is non-existent in Afghanistan.  Colombians have tired of the violence; Afghans worship death and would happily let the blood orgy continue without end.

Add to this that our troops were able to partner with Colombian troops in a way that has been impossible to do with the Afghans. Colombian and American cultures are not really that far apart, especially when the Americans are Hispanic or understand Hispanic culture. At a remote outpost in rural Colombia, I saw a Colombian Army platoon and their Puerto Rican National Guard partners bid one another a tearful goodbye after having worked together for over four months on a radar project.

A “Plan Colombia” for Afghanistan will never work. It is naïve and foolish to think otherwise.  We should run, not walk, from this rancid and failed project known as Afghanistan.

Foreign Policy – Plan Afghanistan
AP – 13 Americans Killed in Taliban Bombing

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

OWS: “Unsafe and Unsanitary”


"Over the last week it was apparent that neither the demonstrators nor the city could maintain safe or sanitary conditions, or control the ongoing vandalism," Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said in a statement. (Alertnet)
It was bound to happen…

Fights Erupt Among OWS Protesters

Rapes and assaults among the squatting socialists have overtaken loud drumming and gender inequality as the primary concern at Occupy Wall Street. Solidarity for solidarity’s sake ain’t workin’ out so well.

Defecators, urinaters and masturbators shut down Occupy Madison…
A neighboring hotel's staff alleged voiced concerns about having to recently escort hotel employees to and from bus stops late at night due to inappropriate behavior, such as public masturbation, from street protesters. (Cardinal)
Hell’s Kitchen

Liberal propaganda outlets deny it, but the kitchen staff at the squalid Wall Street camp is fed up with the moochers. The NY Post has direct quotes from some of the “Hell’s Kitchen” workers:
“We need to limit the amount of food we’re putting out” to curb the influx of derelicts, said Rafael Moreno, a kitchen volunteer. A security volunteer added that the cooks felt “overworked and underappreciated.” (NY Post)
Welcome to the 53%, you drumming dummies!

These unwashed Marxists and academia agitators are learning what responsible people who live in the real world already know: Open the door to bums, deviants and freeloaders, and soon the responsible working people will tire of carrying everyone else. An old lady way back when called this phenomenon, Atlas Shrugging, I think…

When you hoist the freak flag, don’t be surprised when the freaks show up

They are also seeing the downside of fluffing your ranks with false solidarity. Letting in anyone and everyone has its disadvantages. We’re not all good people. There are murderers, rapists and generally bad people among us, and any group must police its own ranks if it wants to maintain its legitimacy and safety.

This is why the tea partiers have not joined the anti-capitalist unwashed rabble collectively known as OWA.