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Samizdata quote of the day I know enough gay people – progs, conservatives, libertarians even – to know that most of them wanted to be accepted and unashamed and then ignored (as if they were just . . . normal!) and are now looking on in horror as “their” movement gets co-opted and taken over by people with huge latex breasts with protruding nipples claiming the right to teach in high schools while dressed that way. That’s not what they wanted, and we made it possible by forcing them to construct a movement when we wouldn’t accept them living quietly amongst us. It was the existence of that ready-built movement that the latex breast people could take over that made all of this fun possible.
I can almost feel Andrew Sullivan’s pain when he says we should remove the “G” and maybe the “L” from the new LGBT movement.
– Bobby B
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I agree with much of what you say – but I doubt that person is gay. Drag queen (dreg queen?) perhaps, definitely queer, and busily doing a “shock the bourgeois” routine. I too am looking on in horror.
If there’s one person I’d blame for all this, it’s Barney Frank. To quote Wikipedia, he was “considered the most prominent gay politician in the United States during his time in Congress.” And as far as I can tell, he got behind a lot of bills giving gays rights. But every time the bill included trans rights, he’d say “the country isn’t ready for this” and get that part of the bill dropped.
This may be just my personal perspective (I do have a dog in this fight) but he could very well be part of the reason transfolk are so prominent in all the publicity fuss going on.
I take a different position. Gays were allowed to live quietly among us. Obviously it wasn’t fair, but so long as they kept it behind closed doors they were left alone, only getting police attention when they got loud.
Then the “we’re here, we’re queer, deal with it” movement started and they left the shadows. They weren’t treated as normal because frankly they aren’t part of the norm. And had it stopped there, maybe there would have been no more said or done, but gays started a movement and in the process they got to shock the nation over and over and over again. Pushing for gay marriage, gay rights at work, gay right here, gay rights there, gay rights everywhere. Then their movement got taken over by people who keep pushing and pushing and pushing. Pride parades turned into Sodom and Gomorrah on floats. Drag queens went from burlesque shows to RuPaul on prime time to Drag Queen Story Hour for children at the public library. We have trannies as mainstream on TV. Now gays are bemoaning the monster they created.
Part of the problem is gays mistook apathy for acceptance. Straights just got tired of being lectured about tolerance and how they are bigots if they don’t actively celebrate what most religions consider a sin and what most people think is a disgusting act at best. But they got worn down and just said “fine, whatever, just leave me alone.” Unfortunately normal people are never just left alone and are constantly pounded with more and more lectures on tolerance and diversity and you’re a bigot and blah blah blah.
Personally, I’m a fan of “do what you want, just don’t tell me about it or jam it down my throat” (pun definitely intended). But sometimes I wonder if maybe it wasn’t better when homosexuals and their love which dare not be spoken aloud and it was kept to the shadows. But that ship has sailed and I don’t see how to fix the current state of affairs when it comes to the transsexuals and pushing that lifestyle on children AND keep the fire of liberty alive.
There are two sides to this.
There is the deliberate effort to smash society (and it is an effort to smash society) – originally thought up by “intellectuals” (the Frankfurt School crowd, plus the “Post Modernists” and others), but later joined by a lot of nutcases and exhibitionists (as the “intellectuals” knew the effort would be) who would not know Frankfurt Germany from Frankfurt Kentucky. These, the “intellectuals” and the nutcases who follow them, do perverted things (yes, I just used the “p word”) in targeting children – their ideal is to sexually mutilate children, but failing that – to corrupt children in every way possible – because children are the future of society and so if you destroy the children, you destroy the future of society.
But there is also the other side – the establishment “conservatives” in so many countries who are terrified of being called “intolerant” or “bigoted” – far from resisting the smashing of society these establishment types (in fear of being thought “intolerant” or “bigoted”) target any real conservative who speaks against what is happening – “this evil racist-sexist-homophobe-transphobe-Islamophobe, is nothing to do with us – we condemn him totally, and have expelled him, death-to-reactionaries!”
The establishment types fail to see that to the left they themselves are “reactionaries”, no matter how much the expel reactionaries or support them being locked up in prison for such “crimes” as pointing out that the 2020 American Presidential Election was blatantly rigged – and, therefore, Joseph Biden is not a legitimate President and has no right to appoint lunatics and weirdos to be, for example, Admirals in the U.S. Navy and Surgeon General of the United States. Yes, I just called the Surgeon General of the United States, who supports “gender affirming surgery” for children, a lunatic and a weirdo – and I just said that Mr Biden is not a legitimate President, as the 2020 Presidential election was rigged, and has no right to appoint this person, or anyone else.
No matter how much establishment “conservatives” in various countries chant “death to the racist-sexist-homophobe-transphobe-Islamophobes!” the left will still come for them, the establishment types, and their children.
You see, my dear establishment types in various countries, to the left there is no difference between you and me – no matter how much you chant that you hate people like me, the left will still come for you and will come for your children.
The majority of those who supported overthrowing the Russian Tsar in 1917 didn’t seek a Communist totalitarian state, but that’s what they got. It’s again the old saying about revolutions, like Saturn, devouring their children.
Oh sorry – I forgot “Climate Denier” and “Covid Denier”.
Note, for example, that Prime Minister Johnson and others were still called these things – even though they, at every point, followed the policies of the international Collectivists on these matters. Extinction Rebellion would still have skinned him alive, and he was still accused of “murdering thousands” by not imposing the (utterly demented and counterproductive) Covid lockdown early enough and keeping it long enough.
It is the same with the sexual mutilation of children – an establishment type can support it, but they will still be called a “transphobe”.
Again – the left sees no difference between an establishment type, and someone like me. You can denounce me, and people like me, as much as you like – but the left will still come for you and for your children.
Yes Martin – to the left there was no difference between Tzar Nicholas II and the socialist Kerensky.
They wanted to destroy both of them.
Just as, to the left, if a life-long Labour Party person expresses some doubt about the destruction of society by, for example, the sexual mutilation of children, or a “Covid lockdown” that will cripple the economy and will NOT “save lives” (or a de facto future “Climate Lockdown”), that life-long Labour Party person is (to the left) the same as me – just another target to be destroyed.
I remember Joseph “Joe – the Big Guy” Biden on a televised “Town Hall” in 2020 supporting “trans rights” for eight-year-children. Did this senile puppet know what he was saying? Most likely not – but the evil Collectivists who control the senile puppet know very well.
Keep that in mind bobby b (and everyone else) – the Federal Government, including the FBI and the “Justice” Department and the United States military (all that Frankfurt School Marxist “Critical Race Theory” and “Gender Theory” indoctrination – people with self-respect are already leaving the United States military and the regime is happy to see them GO), is not controlled by misguided friends – people who wish society well, but just have different opinions. The Federal Government, and the government of many States, is controlled by evil (yes – evil) people. There is nothing, nothing, they will not do – and their objective is destruction.
They tell themselves (at least they used to) that they wish to destroy society in order to replace it with a better society – but really the destruction is for the sake of destruction. Because it is FUN to mutilate and destroy.
There is a lot of evil in me – so I do not find it difficult to understand them.
What does a decent person try and do? They try and use their moral reason to control their passions – they tell themselves, “This is evil, so I ought not to do it”.
An ought from an is (“this IS evil, so I OUGHT not to do it”), and using moral reason (free will – moral agency, being able, with moral effort, to do other than we do) to control the passions – rather than having reason as the slave of the passions. The passion to steal, rape, kill and-so-on (for there is evil in the human soul, and the word “soul” need not mean anything supernatural – the evil can be resisted, but the passions are there).
In short what a decent person tries to do, is the opposite of what fashionable philosophy teaches.
If you want to understand the people who now have vast power – just think of people who listen to the fashionable philosophy (that goes back long before Karl Marx – to Rousseau and even the “Tory” David Hume, who was rightly OPPOSED by Dr Johnson, and before him to Thomas Hobbes and others) and AGREE with it.
The true battle between good and evil is not really in the wider society, it is within each individual human being (human person – free will moral agent), and that battle between moral reason and the passions (between good and evil) is fought every day. And fashionable philosophy “if you feel like doing it – do it” is on the wrong side.
And such ideas have reached many who have never heard of the thinkers who originally pushed them.
Yeah, I doubt that that person even knows if they are gay. And I doubt that it matters in this context, because that person isn’t making any kind of statement or action on behalf of affectional preference, or even of gender identity. But by stealing the basic identity of the earlier movement, they are using its built-up power and legitimacy for their own, different purposes.
To me, it seems more like another iteration of IowaHawk’s little tweet:
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
That’s what this current crop has done to the Gay Pride movement. That movement strikes me now as more of a skin suit covering a completely different purpose and set of goals.
In a Canada where that guy’s “legal right to ‘self-expression'” is everyone else’s legal right to agree unreservedly or else shut up, I expect your doubts are appallingly something-phobic, though, like you, I’m not sure precisely which exact form of gross prejudice we’re all displaying.
I don’t get that Niall. I’d be the last one to tell someone “no, you can’t find a quack to give you hormones and mutilate your genitalia so you can pretend to be a woman” but I fail to see why I should be compelled to play along with their mental illness.
If someone started wearing a Moe Howard haircut, snipped their ears into points, and said everything was “logical” or “fascinating”, should I be legally compelled to agree when that person says he is Mr. Spock?
I’ve long observed that there are two main sorts of “gay” people. On the one hand, you have those who are actually, quietly just attracted to the same sex. No narcissism, no mental issues going on: Just attracted to their own.
Then, you have the other sort, the people who’re gay because they chose that path in order to piss on society, because they’re the sort of contrary transgressive type who would argue with you were you trying to give them a winning lottery ticket. These types are aggressively mentally ill, and the “gay” is more an expression of their mental illness and their issues with society in general than it is their sexual preference.
Most of society’s problems come from that second sort. The quietly gay don’t put themselves out to do things like proselytize underage children, and indeed, decry that when they observe it going on.
Our issue as a society is that apparently, based on lived experience over the last few decades, you cannot accommodate the first group without giving license to the second one to take their given inch a few thousand miles past the limits of common sense and decency.
This is problematic for all concerned, because it not only justifies the excesses of repression we had before, it is going to result in a severe and lasting backlash which will wind up taking a lot of otherwise harmless people out.
One of the things that the current lot of idiot LGBTWTFBBQ activists do not remember or understand is that the excesses of the Weimar era led directly to the repression of the Nazi era. Even though the Nazis leveraged the gay community during their early rise to power, and even had members from that community involved in leadership roles, their transition to legitimacy as a general political movement meant that they had to at least pay lip service to the normies, who were totally disgusted with the depravity and excess of Weimar-era Germany. The Nazis got to power on the back of this excess, because they promised in part, a return to virtue. Herding their former gay allies into the concentration camps was a cheap price for gaining total power, and they gladly paid it.
And there ya go. If the current lot of idiot LGBTWTFBBQ types think they’re going to be part of any “winning coalition”, they’re deluded. My guess is that once they have served their purpose in it all, it’ll be bang, zoom and off to the destructive labor camps with them, ‘cos the new regime is going to need to do two things: One, placate the normies, and two, ramp up the reproductive rate in the face of demographic decline. The LGBTWTFBBQ types are going to be doubly doomed for two reasons, one being that they generally don’t have kids, and two, because the people that do have kids are going to demand that “something be done” about the perverts… Guess whose voices are going to be listened to?
This whole thing is so damn predictable it isn’t even funny. History will inevitably do a rinse/repeat of the 1920s and 1930s, and we’ll all be worse off for it.
Sometimes practicality overrules legally. You can make up your own mind about Spocks, but when I consider some of the Klingons I’ve seen walking around SF cons, discretion may be the better part of valor.
Steven R (September 25, 2022 at 10:07 pm), should I deduce my enraged sarcasm did not come across in the printed text?
Just as the mainly-left-wing-on-issues-they-knew-less-about scientists who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration were surprised to find they were far-right science-denying fascists, but unable to roll-back the narrative, so I was merely noting, in humorous fashion, that Ellen and bobby b, merely for having doubts, can now, by the local law (by what is claimed to be Canadian law – one might hope some tiny part of it is only the school’s eager interpretation of the law as yet) be labeled vile homophobes. My feeble attempt to extract a laugh from the ugly situation was merely to note they will be labelled some other kind of phobe (and relabelled – Oceania has always been at war with EastAsia) as and how it suits the narrative.
(My take, FWIW, is that the guy is gay – is not sensibly excludable from the category ‘gay’ – but can be called other things as well.)
“Neurodivergent” is one of my guesses.
And (introducing a new term!), possibly “crimdivergent.”
Hannah Arendt (‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’‘) notes in passing that, after reading the autobiography of Ernst Rohm (the guy who ordered Hitler to join the Nazi party, head of the StormTroops till June 30th 1934 and loud member of the German League for Homosexual Rights), she found it hard to decide whether he was alienated from bourgeois society because he was gay or else he practised homosexuality as a way of signalling his contempt for bourgeois society. (My guess, FWIW, was both, perhaps with more of the first pretending to be the second than the second pretending to be the first, and a sizable helping of either a homoerotic taste for violence or a taste for homoeroticising violence.)
Related to this, I think your interpretation of the night of the long knives and preceding years is wrong. In German’s last pre-nazi elections, it was the social democratic party who showed cartoons of Rohm ‘drilling’ his SA men, ran ads asking
and generally applied to the Nazis a pre-war anti-Kaiser style of left-wing propaganda which treated being gay as a nasty military-officer-cum-aristocratic perversion that decent working class chaps did not do, and that socialism would cure. I have seen books written in the 1980s (when political correctness was really starting to bite in academia but “if it’s not PC, it never happened” was not yet fully enforced), where the authors’ hideous embarrassment as they twist between approval of resisting Nazis and PC ‘horror’ of the method (and fear of their colleagues) makes a comical spectacle.
It is embarrassing for a leader to kill his colleagues, so Hitler, secondary to the alleged plot and etc., mentioned the SA leaderships’ predilections, but everyone in the party and many in the public knew this was just propaganda.
“How shocked Hitler must have been to learn of Rohm’s immorality.” went the joke that ran round the Nazi party in July 1934. “Whatever will the Fuhrer say when he learns about Goebbels’ club foot?”
The Nazis were not under pressure over it. As was pointed out by Stephen Roberts (a contemporary examiner of National Socialism), the plea that sexual morality had anything to do with it
Julius Streicher was one of these (an example of “cannot be excluded from the category gay – but also (many) other things”) and Roberts noted that it was only with great difficulty that he could find a cartoon from Der Sturmer that could be published in any English newspaper of his day. In 1940, with the war demanding more attention to public morale, Hitler eventually and reluctantly dropped Streicher from being Gauleiter of Franconia, which indicates both public pressure and the fact that it needed a lot of pressure – and of Nazi need for performance – before it mattered.
For the same reason that I think bobby b is mistaken to say
so (although I know nothing this vile is cleaned up without the cleanup generating some mess itself) I think your backlash, like Kathleen Stock’s, may play out quite unlike the ever-more-extreme evolution of their behaviour. (I may expand on that in a later comment discussing the OP; this comment is already long enough.)
Broadening the mind even further 🙂 , an anonymous commenter who claims to be from the class in question (not exactly the most verifiable source pro tem), has told Athena Thorne (h/t instapundit) that the guy was not just due to be fired last year (that idea has been floating around from the start) but was due to be fired for ‘toxic masculinity’ and general insufficient wokeness, so is now identifying as an unfirable teacher, to the significant (and intended) annoyance of the board.
It has for a long time been a standard LGBTSQUERTY propaganda technique to insist that deniers of the truth of LGBTSQUERTY are just in denial that it applies to themselves. So even if this sequence of events were verified, it would be the height of hypocrisy for the movement to doubt that he was merely exemplifying their standard meme of being very in just before he came out.
But I think we should continue to have doubts – including about anonymous commenters.
Niall, your sarcasm came across loud and clear. I just don’t understand how the Canadian edicts are supposed to work in real life was all.
Niall, I will agree that the issue of what went on with regards to the Nazis and the gays is a fairly complex one, with a bunch of different facts arguing both sides of the case we make.
I base mine not so much on the academic scholarly viewpoint, where everything has to be documented and sourced from other parts of the academy, but from actually talking to the people who were involved and who lived in Germany during those years. The perspective of “lived life” is different from the academic one.
Every German I met from those years reported their perceptions about the Nazis as being these counter-revolutionary types that were against the excess and license of Weimar. Were those perceptions accurate? Were they realistic? Hell, no–But, that’s what got those people out voting for Hitler and the Nazis, and kept them supporting all of it.
I’ve done a lot of reading about WWII and the run up to it. Every book I could ever get my hands on that addressed that period, I read. There’s something horribly fascinating when you observe the psychosis that overtook both Japan and Germany which resulted in the horrors they did.
But, here’s the thing: All that reading? You go out and talk to the actual involved parties, about what they saw and believed, explaining why they did it, why it all happened? The two things don’t match up, at all.
You can point out that the Nazis didn’t really repudiate the gays that a lot of Germans believed they were suppressing, that they weren’t moral paragons at all. The German in question is very likely to stick their fingers in their ears, close their eyes, and go “NANANANAACAN’THEARYOU”, then insistently tell you about how the Nazis were good people that put the perverts away in the camps, where they belonged…
In other words, what I’m talking about is not the raw recorded history that’s scholarly and documented, but the actual beliefs of the people who were there. And, they saw the Nazis as suppressing the pervs, and still defend them as having done so–Never mind Rohm’s existence and role in the SA.
When you stop and think about it, the Nazis pulled off a really amazing bit of legerdemain when it came to all the varied and sundry things they managed to co-opt in German society. People were afraid of the Communists, but they liked the socialist promises. So, the Nazis dialed the Communist program back a bit, just enough to make it seem a little less threatening. People didn’t like the licentiousness and corruption of the Weimar era, so the Nazis made themselves over as moral paragons, fighting to defend Good German Values ™. The whole thing is a marvel of public relations and political expediency–The Nazi party was truly all things to all men, and nobody managed to notice how thoroughly contradictory much of their program really was. You can still find Germans who say that the Nazis were good because they reined in Big Bad Business, and were for the little guy with their unions and what-not… Which is pretty much in diametric opposition to reality.
So, yes… You’re absolutely right, with your historical details. You’re also missing the point I’m making, which more describes what was in the German mentality of the times, and which was largely a thing of wonder in terms of self-delusional wishful thinking.
Kinda like most politics today, across the entire West.
There is no way to make Paul Marks come to his senses about this, and use the reason that he thinks we ought to use; but for the benefit of other people who might find the above assertions reasonable, let me point out a few things:
* “This is evil” has exactly the same meaning as “We ought not to do This”.
* Therefore, saying “This is evil, so we ought not to do This” is the same as saying “We ought not to do This, so we ought not to do This”: a tautology.
* In other words: “This is evil” is a normative statement, not a factual statement. (In spite of being, formally, an IS-statement rather than an OUGHT-statement.)
* In my opinion, Paul Marks is nothing short of delusional in thinking that there are people who think that there is nothing wrong in doing evil. (There are, of course, people who think that there is nothing wrong in doing some things that ***Paul Marks*** thinks are evil.)
But doesn’t acceptance of a religion usually mean the acceptance of objective evil in place of the subjective version? Are you critiquing Mr. Marks, or the systems that guide or constrain personal judgment of good?
Bobby: you catch me when i start feeling the need for a good night’s sleep.
I’ll try to give a cogent answer, but no guarantee.
This seems to me like re-framing of the debate. I said nothing about the ‘objectivity’ of statements such as “This is evil”. I see no reason why such a statement cannot be considered both normative AND objective.
I am definitely critiquing Mr Marks. As for the 2nd horn of the dilemma: you formulated it rather vaguely (or am i just too sleepy?) but in any case, in this context i am only critiquing Paul Marks.
My question probably stemmed from my misunderstanding of “normative” as opposed to “subjective.” You say that “this is evil” and “so we should not do it” are identical statements – normative statements, you say – and I read that as stemming from a subjective definition of evil that has been socially agreed-upon.
A religious person will view “evil” as an objective term – defined not by common agreement but by God and so not open to social negotiation or variance, and the “and so we ought not do it” as simply the acceptance of the command. In that case, we no longer play a role in defining evil, merely our response to it (i.e., to not do it.)
(Keep in mind, it is in comments such as this one that my ignorance of most formal philosophical schools of thought shines through! And I really can wait until tomorrow.)
Concerning that Canadian Shop Teacher:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/09/25/or-maybe-the-trans-shop-teacher-is-the-hero-we-need-right-now-n1632054
He may be Alinskying the system.
I hope so.
Bobby: thanks for the thoughtful reply.
I must clarify that the ideas expressed in my comments above are my own, derived from trying to gain a full understanding of the is/ought dichotomy. I always try to find the most sensible interpretation of anything i read, as Karl Popper recommended (and contrary to what Paul Marks seems to practice, i.e. looking for the most nonsensical interpretation).
As for this:
I’d say, first, that it is not only religious people who view “evil” as an objective term, but all people who believe in the existence of an objective moral code (of which we might or might not be able to gain full knowledge).
Second, and more important, i’d say that even a person believing in an objective moral code, in saying “This is evil”, means nothing more or less than “You (and I) should not do This”. What else could “This is evil” possibly mean?
(For the record, i am agnostic about the existence of an objective moral code: i reason that, if there is one, i can only know it by my moral intuitions; and if there isn’t one, then i can do what i like — but what i like is to be guided by my moral intuitions anyway. It’s a one-way bet.)
1) Explicit simple devil worshippers occur. The phenomenon is rare, but not unknown.
2) C.S.Lewis once described certain 17th century puritans as devil worshippers
Communism under Stalin contained these two kinds.
a) There were torturers who fitted Burke’s warning that a vicious persecutor is often a perfect unbeliever of his own creed. Zatonsky enjoyed boasting that if he had Karl Marx in his hands he’d soon make him confess to being an agent of Bismark. He served the party for the perverted fun of it, and did his bit to ensure it would be defined so.
b) There were many many more who worshipped the overt communist goal, although its nature as they defined it and operated it was devilish.
So I do not think that “Paul Marks is nothing short of delusional”. I think those two kinds do occur, and also there are activists, sometimes deceitful, sometimes self-deluding, who show traits of both.
There are also the genuinely duped, and the self-indulgently duped. And there are the many who, uncomprehending of what we think or why, confabulate that we are the ones motivated by evil – which is a warning to us not to be overeager to classify others so. Paul may sometimes be overeager so to do, but categories (a) and (b) and (1) and (2) very much exist, and Paul is not deluded to think so.
Kirk (September 26, 2022 at 4:56 pm), after the war, many Germans somewhat rewrote pre-war and wartime history in their heads – emphasising some things and downplaying others.
In some related spheres, I simply agree with you. For example, I think it likely that people at the time were genuinely incompletely aware of the full-range of responsibility for Weimar’s Soros-prosecutor-like amnesties of minor criminals from time to time. The bleeding heart liberals wanted to show how nobly their hearts bled for these unfortunates, how well their rehabilitation programmes worked – and did not want to mention that from time to time they got the votes in very unholy alliance with the communists and nazis who both wanted to get their activists back on the streets. It was in no-one’s interest to mention, for example, that BTW the latest amnesty will spare Goebbels that jail sentence he’d been given. I think voters who did not know this could in part honestly complain of being deceived by the nazis enemies more than by the nazis, and also in part quite correctly believe that, regardless of current behaviour, once the nazis were in charge, amnesties for those in jail would be restricted to nazis. And all this simply floated on general cultural knowledge that the left-liberals were into not punishing criminals whereas the nazis were very into punishing their enemies, putting an obstacle in the path of anyone trying to make the reality known.
However, as discussed in my prior comment on this, when the nazis could be easily differentiated, in numbers and loudness, from their political enemies, those enemies were willing to let the public know, and those members of the public who avoided knowing worked at it, either at the time or (more often, I think) by selective re-emphasis of memories after the war. And all this floated on popular German perceptions and misperceptions that went back, sustained by scandals in pre-war court and military circles, all the way to Freddie the Great himself. So, as you say, things were a lot more complicated in this area.
I agree with you that the turn away from Weimar had a large flavouring of wish for more ‘order’ and ‘tradition’, but one of the things I think many Germans preferred to reinterpret after the end of WWII was how, in the early 30s, they overcame, or simply ignored, reasons to doubt the nazis would provide that.
Germany’s Jews were glad when Hitler broke the power of the SA in mid-1934 – along with other groups whose views did not greatly influence the Fuhrer, who acted for his own reasons.
To sum up, the relationship between nazis and gays was indeed complicated – sufficiently so that the future of today’s absurdities in the LGBTSQUERTY area specifically can, I think, only with great caution and difficulty in a very limited way be aided by Weimar comparisons. In related areas, by contrast – the cruel ‘mercy’ of Soros-prosecutors, for example – I think they are safer to use.
Niall: wrt your reply to me at 12:58 pm:
Again, the people in your categories (a), (b), (1), (2), do evil by “our” standards, but it remains to be established whether they consider it evil. It seems likely to me that at least some of them reject the very concept of “evil”. This seems especially likely for the Satanists in class (1) and the sadists in class (a) (several of which appear in Jason Matthews’ Red Sparrow trilogy).
It also seems likely to me that many if not most true believers in Communism in group (b) — as well as true believers in Nazism — and possibly the people in group (2), believe that THEY were the good guys.
Niall,
The root of what I’m getting at with the Wiemar era becoming directly causative of the Nazi era isn’t necessarily in the documentation. It’s in the Zeitgeist of the times, the critical mass of the social animal that was Germany as a whole.
Every regime collapse brings on an interregnum where the social mores and values of the previously stable regime are abandoned wholesale: “Well, that didn’t work…”, and people are left rudderless in rough seas of change as things settle out. That’s why the libertines love these eras; they are suddenly able to say “Gee, the rule-makers failed and are gone… There ain’t no more rules, so let’s have fun!!!”
Regency England was a place where the old rules had failed, and the old regime ended, having discredited itself with the various failures of things like the South Seas Bubble and the collapse of trust in the stability of all things, everywhere. Coupled with loss of the American colonies, the French Revolution, and… Well, there you were: Perfect storm situation enabling the libertine and perverse to edge their way into being able to ignore the rules. Regency excess then led to Victorian repression. Go back and look, and you’ll see the same social syndrome happening, time and again down the corridors of history, like some sort of social sine wave. Push the pendulum too far, it swings back–And, the harder you push, the further you go? The worse the backswing becomes.
Weimar made Nazism not only possible for the German mind, but damn near necessary. License had to be answered with repression, as irrational as that seems. You see the same mentality in the “Karen phenomenon” of today; most of those dour unsmiling “I want to see the manager…” types are at the opposite end of the sine wave from those they see as transgressing against them, and they’re even sometimes the same transgressively lousy human ten years on from when they were assholes… It’s like the old man railing at the kids on his lawn; nine will get you ten that he was the kid riding the bike across someone else’s yard, sixty years earlier.
Moderation in all things, I say. Keep that freakin’ pendulum there in the middle, where you don’t have people being “cancelled” for expressing an opinion, and you won’t have people being burnt at the stake for witchcraft or pedophilia, either. Social nuttiness of any sort is usually the outcome of excess, in one direction or the other.
Kirk, the South Sea Bubble was a near century before the regency – 1720, not 1811. The American War of Independence and the French Revolution were also before the Regency, which did not begin until 1811 after the death of his favourite daughter precipitated George III into a madness that was obvious not going to abate soon (and in fact proved permanent IIRC). The idea of a regency bill had been around since George’s first bout in 1789, but he recovered before the bill passed the Lords.
Generally, the British ruling class and culture were rejuvenated by the cultural, political and military challenge of the French revolution – they were obliged to rise to the challenge and eventually did so. This did indeed involve a cultural and political defeat for the libertines, and a triumph for attitudes Burke had been championing since long before they were fashionable.
Burke would certainly agree with you about moderation (so would Montesquiou).
Oh, I know the timeline. Things flowed more slowly, then. The failure of the Regency era had its roots going back a lot further, right back to the late 1600s, as did the excesses.
History flows a lot faster, these days. Why? I have no idea, but it’s an observable fact. The Romans had centuries of stability as a republic, then as empire. The British Empire rose and fell into senescence within a hundred years; likewise, the US. Japan had it’s moment in the sun back during the 1980s, when everyone thought they’d run the world. How long did they last?
The pace of history is ever accelerating. At some point, world power is going to come and go with the ephemera of a TikTok fad, at the rate we’re going.
Datapoint:
https://freebeacon.com/national-security/trans-army-doctor-indicted-for-trying-to-give-soldiers-medical-info-to-russia/
There were reasons that we used to deny clearances to the “gender confused”. And, those reasons usually had a lot less to do than “moral indignation” over their supposed failings, and rather a lot more to do with the sad fact that there are usually whole constellations of other mental disorders clustering around the gender-related ones. Ones that should, in a sane and responsible world, preclude putting the people exhibiting them into positions of trust and responsibility.
Bradley Manning is a classic example of this, and a case study in why “woke” don’t work: His supervisors and security manager (the first-line guy responsible for oversight of security clearances in any organization) all thought he should have his clearance denied and/or pulled, once it was issued. Unfortunately, because he was both a “protected class” and filling a critical slot they needed for deployment, they didn’t do that. And, we got what we got. Which was a bunch of dead HUMINT assets whose identities were revealed through the good offices of Wikileaks and the egotistical Assange, who refused to take the time to scrub those identities from the data.
Good friend of mine got to watch as his local network of cultural informants got whacked one-by-one by the Taliban because of Manning and Assange. Don’t talk to me about how it was harmless fun that those two were up to. If it was up to me, the pair of them would be under Leavenworth, if only as a salutary example to others.
most of them wanted to be accepted and unashamed and then ignored
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None of the data about how gays actually live supports the “most are normies” assertion.
The “Born that Way” myth dissolved when the human genome was mapped, finding no genetic correlation or plausible biological cause. The propaganda machine churned on…
In-depth research into the histories of homosexuals consistently shows pervasive patterns of molestation, family violence/estrangement, and missed developmental/social milestones…
The complusive promiscuity and super-high rates of substance abuse, depression, pedophilia, and suicide that typify “out-n-proud” life are untreated expressions of dysfunction, and coping mechanisms. Freud and others observed this long ago.
The correct – and compassionate – language to discuss homosexuality is the language of mental/psychic distress and dysfunction.
I am sure there are high-functioning homosexuals – but the number of sexually faithful long-term couples is a tiny fraction of a “community” that is already a tiny fraction of society. There was no need to rewrite the basic social contract of marriage for this vanishingly small group – they could already use property and contract laws that accommodated the unmarried hetero couples of the 70s.
The push to change the language from dysfunction to human rights was politically motivated, part of a larger culture war…. When the Left cultivates a Sacred Victim Group it never, ever intends to “empower” anyone but themselves. The LGBT movement was devised and deployed to destroy the West – morally, culturally, structurally. That is why marriage was redefined even though a vanishingly small number of gays make use of this new “right”. That is why the silent majority is being forced to agree.
The trail of dysfunction starts wayyy before the trannies….
If human reason is, and ought to be, the “slave of the passions” then it is just instrumental – about “how do I get away with this?”.
Such a society, where reason was the slave of the passions, would be Hell on Earth – with men robbing, raping, murdering and-so-on – using their reason to try and escape just punishment for their crimes. The just person does not use his reason to escape just punishment – on the contrary he follows his moral reason to not commit these transgressions, and (if he “fails the test” as Tolkien would put it, and allows his passions to defeat his moral reason), then he hands himself over for just punishment – not as a “Prisoner’s Dilemma” effort to get a lower sentence (the punishment should not be less severe), but out of justice – moral reason.
As for reason itself – this depends on the existence of human personhood, the very thing (the “I” – the soul in the Aristotelian sense) that Mr David Hume denied. A computer does not really “reason” – for it is not a person (not a free will moral agent).
What Mr J.S. Mill called “the light of Hume” is really the darkness of Hume – it does not “explain the human mind”, it explains AWAY the human mind (personhood – being a human being, a subject not just an object).
There is no mind (no “I” – no free will moral agent, human person) in such a system.
Essentially David Hume is Thomas Hobbes – he just uses more gentle language. Both of them essentially deny their own existence as persons (beings).
I am reminded of the exchange of writings between Martin Luther and Erasmus.
It turned out that Dr Luther, when he had said “here I stand – I can do no other” was not making a statement of moral conscience, because Dr Luther did not really believe in the existence of moral conscience – Dr Luther actually believed that actions were predetermined, that people (who were not really people – not persons) could do no other than they do.
This goes further than making God the author of evil (for if everything is predetermined, if these human shaped robots can do no other than they do, the fault is their creator’s – not theirs), it destroys the very concepts of moral good and moral evil.
We do not say that a rabid person is evil when he bites – because the moral reason of the human shaped beast has been eaten away by his disease, there is no more reason (no person – no free will moral agency) there to control the passions. And we do not say that a stone is evil when (disturbed by some shaking of the ground) it falls on someone’s head – because the stone could not have CHOSEN to do other than it did.
The Criminal Law, and just about everything else, is based upon the ability of persons to do other than they do – their ability to resist their passions and, by moral reasoning, choose NOT to do various things. Without human moral agency (free wil) – there are no persons, no beings. No subjects – rather than just objects.
Each person, every day, faces the struggle between good and evil in themselves – the struggle between moral reason and the passions.
For someone such as Mr Hobbes or Mr Hume, to come along and say “you cannot, and should not, win this struggle against the passions – indeed you as a human “I” do not really exist” is not helpful. And nor is it true.
This is not to say that such thinkers do not have good (good as in correct – rather than good as in moral) things to say on other matters.
For example, the attack Mr Hume makes on fiat money, credit bubble banking and corporations is a powerful one. Richard Cantillon makes a better attack – but that does not take anything away from Mr Hume.
And Mr Hobbes is probably correct when he argues that a sales tax is less bad than a tax on income or property. There is no such thing as a good tax, all taxes do harm, but some forms of taxation ae a bit less harmful than other forms – and also less difficult to control (to prevent going up and up).
A sales tax openly hits everyone, it does not give some people the illusion (and it is an illusion) that the tax “is not hitting me” – both an income tax and a property tax do promote this illusion, leading to some people to falsely think that the tax is not hitting them and, thus, being indifferent to its increase.
The classic example of this form of mistaken thinking is, as I have often pointed out, in Ireland in the late 1840s.
Under the slogan “Irish Property must pay for Irish Poverty” the Poor Law Property Tax (only introduced in the 1830s – just as the government school system in Ireland was introduced in the 1830s) went up and up in the late 1840s – all over the country (after the Act compelling other “Poor Law Unions” to bail out bankrupt “Poor Law Unions”) and the Irish economy imploded.
One third of the population either died or had to leave the country – and people today still blame “laissez faire” rather than CRUSHING TAXATION.
Had the Irish tax system been a sales tax system, not a property tax system, this illusion (the illusion that a tax hits “the rich” only – rather than being passed on to everyone) might not have taken root – perhaps not even in the deluded mind of Sir Charles Trevelyan. For it would have been obvious that the sales tax hit everyone and so the madness of “we will deal with poverty by increasing taxation” (which set up a vicious circle of more poverty, due to the potato failure, leading to higher taxes, which led to more poverty, which led to higher taxes, which led to more poverty….”) might not have happened.
Obviously not having either a property tax or a sales tax, would have been better still.
After the “public services” deemed “essential” in the 1840s had not existed in Ireland – within living memory.
Edmund Burke had pointed out in the 18th century (1700s) that taxation, as a proportion of the economy, was higher in Ireland than in England Wales or Scotland (not lower, as most people thought) – as a proportion of the economy taxation was higher in Ireland than in England Wales or Scotland.
Had someone told Mr Burke “I know – we will introduce a national police force in Ireland, and a system of government schools, and a POOR LAW – all to be paid for by increasing local taxation, making it even higher than it already is” he might well have had a stroke.