You couldn’t have asked for a better insight into the po-mo, relativistic, judgement-dodging mush of modern Western liberalism than the recent commentary on IS. No less a figure than President Obama got the ball rolling last week when he said at the National Prayer Breakfast that we largely Christian Westerners should come down from the moral highground on the issue of Islamist violence. ‘Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ… [And] slavery and Jim Crow all too often [were] justified in the name of Christ’, he said. If you heard a smartarse sixth-former who’d just discovered Richard Dawkins’ Twitterfeed and is prepping for a BA in post-colonialist codswallop say ‘We burned people 500 years ago, you know’, you wouldn’t bat an eyelid. But the leader of the free world? The face of ostensibly Christian America? The man who, for better or worse, is the embodiment of the West? For Obama to respond to Islamist violence by saying ‘we did it, too’ is surreal — like if in 1985 Ronald Reagan had said, ‘I had to queue for eight minutes the other day to pay for my loaf of bread, so let’s lay off the Soviets, yeah?’
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Samizdata quote of the dayFebruary 10th, 2015 |
 22 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Come to think of it, the US still deports former SS concentration camp guards when it finds them. Considering what we did to the Indians, maybe we should stop doing that.
You know, I’d love to see that defense raised in a US court….
But of course Indians treated other Indians terribly too, even before The Pox Ridden White Man ever set foot on the continent. Subsets of mankind have been shoving other subsets around since the dawn of recorded history. I’m pretty much George Carlin on this front, I just sit back and watch. It isn’t me who’s doing all this, so I don’t feel bad personally about it. My aim is simply to not be a shovee if I can avoid it. Of course, when the USG becomes The Singularity, that’s going to be pretty tough to do…
If the USG became the Singularity, it would vanish up its own arsehole with an earth shattering rumble, so the sooner the better.
If you heard a smartarse sixth-former who’d just discovered Richard Dawkins’ Twitterfeed and is prepping for a BA in post-colonialist codswallop…
Heh heh.
It’s the Dogma of Otherness. Western civ’s gift of self-criticism mutated into an auto-immune disease.
While the capacity to be cruel exists within all peoples, past and present, the hope for humanity continues to be that we can overcome these tendencies, not seek to excuse them. President Obama’s comparison was puerile and offensive to those slaughtered by the barbarous followers of ISIS.
Mick Hartley highlights a bit more about ISIS:
http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2015/02/by-pouring-acid-on-their-faces.html
http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2015/02/isis-crimes-are-based-on-islamic-sources.html
I wonder what President Obama thinks about that?
Mr Obama is daft.
Is President Obama now claiming that he was involved in the crusades or the inquisition? Or that the church to which he belongs was? For him to feel guilt over these things, presumably he should be claiming something like this? So we know President Obama is a Catholic, and appears to be at least seven hundred years old (roughly)…
This sort of collective guilt irritates me. So what if one of my ancestors once owned slaves (not that I know any did – good, downtrodden working men all, other than the ones who became inexplicably rich and disappear for thirty years…), I don’t and I oppose slavery. I do not carry the sins of my forefathers, because they were not me, and I do not judge others by their forefathers’ sins. Because to do so is to concentrate on skin colour or national origins or something at the expense of treating people as individuals – I believe this is called racism? – and is stupid.
As Paul says, President Obama is daft if he feels that we cannot condemn outright the actions of someone today because someone did something in the name of Christ hundreds of years ago. And he is even more daft if he has forgotten that the US is not offically a Christian country, so any policy he tries to base on this judgement is actually unconstituional…
The sad thing is, is that Obama still is that smart arsed sixth former. His intellectual development has progressed not one jot since his adolescent days as Barry the Toker.
Obama perfectly encapsulates the qualities of the current leaders of most western countries: cringing and self-loathing.
So how can we on the right exploit it to our advantage? There must be some way of doing so.
“The Crusaders did barbaric things to Muslims you know” is a classic fallacy that Islamic apologists tend to regularly trot out as a weak attempt to argue something resembling a weak justification for Muslims committing atrocities today.
It contains three logical fallacies:
1. is irrelevant;
2. it is ignoratio elenchi (a “red herring” or genetic fallacy);
3. it is a non sequitur (“it does not follow”; or irrelevant conclusion: diverts attention away from a fact in dispute rather than addressing it directly).
That someone in the position of POTUS might come out with such tripe (i.e., containing 3 logical fallacies) and that this tripe might be treated seriously speaks volumes about that person and about the electorate who put him in that position.
The latter would seem to clearly deserve everything that they probably have coming to them and which they might just now be belatedly beginning to get a glimmer of.
The Emperor hath no clothes.
Allah is great and all-knowing.
Voting UKIP is now, for me, more about culture than leaving the EU. Farage comes across as Churchillian next to the current clowns in power (not to mention Milliband).
The Crusaders did barbaric things to Christians; the slaughter and looting from Christians in Constantinople, a Christian city.
“Voting UKIP is now, for me, more about culture than leaving the EU.”
– and could be so for the majority of true Brits as well, though they might not appreciate it until too late.
I don’t put anything beyond Obama when it comes to his apologia of Islam. He also called the attack on the Paris Kosher butcher a “random attack on a deli” – totally whitewashing any anti-semetic motive behind the attack, as if those who were killed were murdered with no more intent than a lightning strike.
Further to my last comment, here is the Mark Steyn’s take
http://www.steynonline.com/6800/no-jews-to-see-here
….’speaks volumes about that person and about the electorate who put him in that position.’
Reminds me of a statement made here several years ago that said, in effect, –
The U.S. can survive an Obama presidency but it may not survive an electorate stupid enough to put him in office in the first place.
Profound and prophetic !!!
“Voting UKIP is now, for me, more about culture than leaving the EU. Farage comes across as Churchillian next to the current clowns in power (not to mention Milliband).”
Yes, Churchillian. He has the same firmness of principle and belief, and wouldn’t let his party swing to the left because he can pick up more votes that way or anything…
Have you seen their Labour-lite recent policies or are you just projecting your beliefs onto Mr Farage out of hope?
Well it was a statement about the relative Churchillness of various political leaders, as indicated by the ‘next to the…’.
In other words; get a life.
President Frontman would read anything put in front of him, no matter how juvenile, as long as it conformed to the prog anti-western dogma.
Why is anyone even mildly surprised by this shill’s act any longer?
He’s empty in every sense of the word.
This is, i believe, the 1st time i defend Obama, and it is a qualified defense; but, as i understand, Obama unequivocally condemned ISIS as a death cult: what he defended was Islam, not ISIS.
In fact, it sounds to me like progress from his previous claim that Islamists are misunderstanders of Islam: now he claims that ISIS is just as representative of Islam as the Crusaders are representative of Christianity; that is to say, ISIS is actually quite close to Islam. This implication of his speech ought to be emphasized, lest he disown it later.