Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch posted this piece on Saturday. It's going to last for a long time yet. There is going to be over the coming years a tragic split in our culture between conformists who grip the norm and will not let go for anything, totalitarians at heart, those who cannot, and those who will refuse to, think critically or imaginatively or openly about things such as Human freedom or even ambiguity in Human affairs, those preferring rigid ideological group-think that will give them the confidence and security of a ready-made set of ideas and cliches to speak from to give the impression to the gullible that the ideologue is a sophisticate or an intellectual, a constant safe script to speak from, a conformity of mind and character that will offer protection from the hard realities of living, and a safety that will place the ideologue in an imaginary position of moralistic superiority in his own mind, that will shield him from all criticism, give him strength in times of doubt, and an identity on which to hang an empty personality; and on the other side will be the revolutionary free-thinkers, and those too who are just commonly sensible, those who just don't buy bullshit because it's popular with their friends, those who are, in short, individualists. There will be a division, and it will make some stranger bedfellows of many of us. Take the average middle-class Protestant middle-aged cranky guy and the homosexual porn star. Not exactly on the face of it a marriage made in Heaven. But, that's the nature of thinkings, as Thales put it. Thinks happen one would not have guessed from the start. And that's very cool. Not of course for the conformity hippies. They have to torture themselves to maintain impossible poses. Yeah, I kind of like that too. If Michael Lucas were to make a film of such.... No, I think I'd pass. Otherwise, lunch would be excellent. Coffee? I'm up for it. In some ways he's definitely my kind of man.
"Speaking of racism in relation to religion, not to a race, is a big disservice to language and to intelligence"
Michael Lucas is described at the end of this piece in this way: "Gay pornographic actor and activist Michael Lucas is the CEO and founder of Lucas Entertainment, a New York-based gay adult film company." Unlike most gay activists, he seems to have realized that there is a big difference between Osama bin Laden and Pat Robertson -- and has accordingly been charged with being "racist" and "intolerant" by the thoroughly propagandized students at Stanford University. Here is his defense:
"Op-Ed: Racism and intolerance: disappointing at a liberal university," by Mike Lucas in the Stanford Daily (thanks to Paul):
Let me first address the "racism" remarks and the accusation of me being "racist" ["Adult film star's remarks spark debate," Feb. 14]. I was disappointed (but not very surprised) by the reaction that I got from some of the students at Stanford (as I've been wrongly accused of racism before).Posted by Robert at February 16, 2008 12:13 PMSpeaking of racism in relation to religion, not to a race, is a big disservice to language and to intelligence. I never in my life said or wrote a bad word about Arabs — go read any of my articles. My criticism was always addressed towards the religion and ideology of Islam. So I would like to ask Stanford students not to exploit the word 'racism' at their own convenience. It's shocking to me that some students do not know what that term means but handle it with such wanton impudence. Maybe such a hole in the education should be brought to the attention of the teaching faculty of your university.
In fact, some of my role models are Arabs for whom I have tremendous admiration. I'm talking about the likes of Wafa Sultan, who has confronted and condemned Islam on many occasions and for whose lectures I will travel across the country, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose book "Infidel" also helped me to shape my opinions. Both of these women secularized, as Islam in their opinion is the ideology of backwardness and hate. They rightly point out that Islam hasn't changed, or evolved, for 1,400 years; it has always suppressed every progressive thought. Needless to say, these women were forced to live in exile in the United States and live with hired security 24 hours a day. As I hope you know, Islam does not forgive. It forbids any criticism. Think Salman Rushdie. Think Theo Van Gogh, for his portrayal of the misery of women in Muslim countries. Think of the Danish cartoonists who are hiding in safe houses. The list is long.
What fostered my distain for Islam? The contempt that Muslim men vomit on women, treating them with less respect than camels. That includes the infibulation — female circumcision — of young girls; the imposition of chadors and burqas; the decapitation of adulterous wives (but never adulterous husbands); the fact that, in most Muslim countries, women cannot go to school, see a doctor or even leave their own houses without a male escort; the approval of polygamy; the arranged marriages that involve girls as young as 9; the barring of women from taking part in public life or in any receptions, even those of their own weddings; the death penalty for drinkers of alcohol; the mutilation penalty for thieves; the public killings of homosexuals. Doesn't all of this originate from the Koran? Have you ever thought that, instead of protesting me, you should protest against those atrocities, maybe organizing some short demonstration in front of Muslim embassies? Why instead are you unleashing your hate against one who speaks against those crimes? Why are you denying my right to compare the Koran, the text in which these facts originate, to Hitler's "Mein Kampf?" The Koran, that for 1,400 years has tormented humanity more than the Bible, the Gospels and the Torah combined? Do not suppress or boycott someone who has a different opinion, even if you disagree with this opinion. Debate it. Argue it. In a civilized manner. Otherwise, what is the difference between you and Islam?
I do very well realize where this reaction is coming from. Stanford is a liberal university, and I very much hope that the good word "liberalism" is not degraded in your institution as it has been degraded by the likes of Michael Moore, Rosie O'Donnell, Ward Churchill, Noam Chomsky and many others. I hope the word "liberal" in the mind of Stanford students still means "progressive" and "broad-minded." The left symbolizes progress. At least, it has done so in the past. It has always stood for women's rights, for gay rights, for the rights of African-Americans. The reaction which I see today at Stanford demonstrates to me that there are changes in the left and that these changes are for the worst. What I read today in The Stanford Daily is nothing more than intellectual terrorism. A dogmatism that I can only compare to one of religion. (If-you-don't-think-what-I
-think,-you-are-an-idiot-and-a -delinquent.) It's difficult for me to understand how the progressive left can defend the most backwards and reactionary ideology on earth, the ideology of Islam.
http://www.jihadwatch.org
Why do I go on about Death Hippies and Presbyterians and Left dhimmi fascists of all kinds? Well, they are those who would help, if only by cheer-leading and apologizing, those who would murder people such as Michael Lucas. He and I might both be cineastes, and we might both drink coffee, but beyond that, not much is going on between us. That and the fact that we're both democrats who value individuals over ideology. It is that commitment to freedom of thought and action of individuals and individualists that will make some strange bedfellows and that will split the world in strange ways, leaving the Death Hippies to side with the Muslims fascists and each other while I make common cause with gay porno guys and Christian fundamentalists and Hindu nationalists and just about anyone who cares at all about preserving our beautiful Modernity. The conformity hippies will sink in a stew of their own idiocy, taking down too many primitive reactionaries with them simply because the comformity hippies are afraid of ambiguity, afraid of freedom, afraid of being alone against the crowd of their fellows, fellows who will turn on them anyway if and when it's convenient. And in the end I'll be -- ah, shoulder to shoulder with men like Michael Lucas. Free men and free women.
28 comments:
First they came for the Jews... and then they came for the gay porn stars. Who'd a thunk. Actually, it wasn't that different last time.
I'm glad he sees that the students today on the left-mainstream side of the campus have nothing but intellectual terrorism to offer. That's something we all need to make more fun of.
Strange times make strange bedfellows (pun fully intended). Heh, heh!
It's quite a revelation to read the comments at the Stanford Daily, by Stanford's students. Their agitated non-argument utterings are an embarrassment to what's supposedly a top American university. Definitely not Stanford's finest.
As a youth I was enthralled by the "youth movement" of my time, as well as by my own self and my youthful friends and fellows, thinking we had give to us by the gods all the knowledge that had existed in the Mysteries eternally out of reach of fools like our parents. And we did have something, certainly compared to those who came before us, like the Khemer Rouge, like the Red Guards, like the Hitler Youth, like the Young Pioneers and Comsomol, like der Wandervogel: we had relatively lots of money and absolutely freedom from social restraint, freedom from most things other than the pursuit of our hedoistic moralisms. Wow, man. As I recall it was far out. But I also see in my maturity that it is not such a cool thing to be of a 20th century youth movement, regardless of which one. They turn out to be frenzied and frantic and conformist and dangerous, not at all the peace-loving Nature-worshipping and sharing/caring get togethers the seem on the surface. We see the rigidity and conformity of bell-bottom pants and paisley shirts and love beads and headbands very clearly now in the uniformity of grandchildren of the hippies of yore: gay-bashing, woman-hating, feudalist Left dhimmi fascists.
The New Man? The New Age? "There is nothing new under the sun. All is vanity."
Except Obama. He promises change and a binding us all together.
Good stuff. What an odd world we live in.
Off topic a bit I came across this site. It's a great history of the Human Rights Movement in Canada.
http://www.historyofrights.com/introduction.html
OT but important:
In light of the Canadian Islamic Congress' demographic Jihad against Canada, you should make every effort to stop the Canadian government from recognizing ethnic Albanians' unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo from Serbia. You can be sure that the Mohammedans in Canada will be watching Kosovo with special interest and lobbying for its independence.
I just got home from downtown. There was a parade of cars honking like mad and waving Albanian and Canadian flags going down Robson. I wasn't close enough to see if anyone knew who they were, or cared, or than being annoyed by the noise.
Conflict is inevitable when people refuse to accept the principle of sharing social values regardless of the political landscape.
The rule of law should represent the truth. Truth isn't defined by any political process. I have made no contradiction.
The fact is that liberal lobby groups have manipulated the rule of law until it no longer represents the truth or our social values. This is a very disruptive and dangerous situation. Wars have begun from it.
I don't consider the personal liberty to support murdering helpless babies, or gender/racial based discrimination, or sexual promiscuity signs of human dignity. They are injustices that should be purged from society that many good people have already died fighting against.
I still advocate the use of argument to settle disputes, but when the opponents can't agree to the basic social value of discerning the truth through honesty, intelligence logic and science, there is little hope for peace.
Try refuting the truth of this argument.
Homosexuality is less than equal to heterosexuality as defined by reproduction, the result of sex, the act which defines them.
It is our responsibility to discriminate between unequal things.
It is our responsibility to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.
The Liberals corrupted our Charter in 2003.
Nature has its ways of pouring bleach into the gene pool without any help from us mere mortals. The best I would hope for is keeping my own life in some kind of good order and making and keeping good friends who band together to keep the neighborhood clean and crime free. It's not my business what people do, for the most part, even if they want to wreck everything and destroy the world. Yes, I'll try t stop them, but that'd be a personal effort, not one worth winning if people are so determined to lose anyway. Here and now we see a small gaggle of "activists" who torment the world and lead where the passive follow out of the innate need to conform and the inertia of the rest. Those who wrestle to change the course of events are destined to win or lose only if they persevere, not because anyone thinks they're right. People will agree to the damnedest stupid things. It comes to power and commitment and determination. Maybe once in a while the winners are right. Life tells. Who survives? Whose children are healthy? Who has healthy grandchildren? Ideology is for fools.
Depends what you mean by ideology. I know you're not advocating nihilism or relativism, Dag.
I'm sure that somewhere I've written on the origins of "ideology" in the late 18th century, a term concocted by a minor French intellectual, a term now used to denote, in my mind, one who follows a pre-set political programme based on a "systematic philosophy," or, as I prefer it, generally some pseudo-scientfic rubbish like Marxist "historical dialectics" or any post-modernist canned thinking. Ideology stands in for ideas, for thinking, for criticism, for clarity and aporia, for curiosity, for creativity. We get, in the case of ideologues, those who would kill for the "programme, those who see only the masses" rather than individuals. In the ideologue we get those who are, for example, as I think I pithily put it: "Conformity Hippies."
Ideas need not, and until the 18th century were not, ideological. Codes, tenets, beliefs, understanding, and so on, none of them are ideological. It is when people have even less than the canned thinking of a pseudo-scientist to ape that one finds such strange fruit as now in Wales. Nihilism's crop. We can do better, though, than settle for ideology. We could do well. We could be grand. We could be honest in our ignorance and celebrate it. We could think a bit and be happy we don't know everything, but that tomorrow we could return to ask a bit more and be utterly amazed by our lack of understanding, tearful from joy at the chance to learn so much in such a short time.
Maybe, like th elibrarian we need so badly this day, G.E. Lessing, we can tell that no, we cannot live so long as to learn all one needs to know; that the wheel of eternity brings us round and again till we are full and ready to move on to something fine indeed but not till then forever.
So ideology is what one constructs when one is yet unable to embrace the uncertainty or open-endedness of all things human... Still, to get to the point where you can embrace open-endedness you need something, some basis for faith, some kind of anthropology, some way of rigorously thinking about the human creature that is continually assimilating and thus discounting our latest intellectual achievements, and thus requiring us to think yet again about how the old dog will learn new tricks to save himself from himself...
Simple geography, for example, produces all kinds of familial relationships that don't exist universally, and that are still successful in terms of healthy children and productive lives of stable people. There is no one way, so far as I see, to live the perfect life. So, no, there can't be a book of rules one must follow, even if it's written by Dear Leader or Uncle Joe or Hitler or Mohammed or any other loony who knew it all. What tells is not the rules we follow or the rites but whether people have successful grandchildren, which increasingly we decrease. Conformity hippies are, and the Left dhimmi fascism of our time is, a failure and a catastrophe. It is an ideology rather than a thought that guides us in our day. Rather than the stoicism and dignitas of our grandfathers we live with the ideology of clowns and hippies. Rahter than the personal core of successful families contained within the solitary private person, we have group-think hippies passing judgments in Human Rights Tribunals. And from where do such ideas come? From the 19th century, from the 18th century. They do not come from real life. And they cannot, because life has never before been so good or so long. It is a new thing to live as we do. We need new ways of thinking about our beautiful Modernity. We have what no one else has had before: a clean and long-lived life for individuals. It is a great thing that terrifies too many to the point they just up and die in their teens. But we will not save ourselves by concocting an ideology like Marx, nothing like anything gone before us. Not like Hegel. Not like any other.
Why do we find a delusional Left resistant to our beautiful Modernity? Why do they hate Mr Tidybowl and Aunt Jemimah? Because Mr. Clean and his host of household cleaning product assosiates are Revolutionaries who destroy the world as it has been: nasty, dirty, germ-ridden, brutish and squalid. Short, too. and stinking.
It is a shock to the mind of many that life is so good and so long and so clean and well-lighted. It is an offense to the povertarian that people have so much. It offends that there is so much good in a world so many feel innately should be one of misery and pain and death all around. They cannot believe the abundance of the good or the goods, thinking it must be some mistake, some plot, some horrible joke that will end in universal misery if not stopped now and forever. So they keep looking for the perfect paradise of the return to the prelapsarian day, looking for a time before all this plenty. They seek some scheme that will explain how all this is evil and must end in global warming or some such, some end of the world, some apocalypse of poverty. And becasue it isn't there and can't be made to be there, they make it up, can it, package it, and decorate it as ideology, whole and uniform and digested by the gnostic priests of Left Reaction.
Mr Tidybowl marches on, and he don't need no fools telling him progress is a bad thing, that he's harming the environment, of which none of us can make any sense even if we were experts. Mr. Tidybowl tells. He is not an ideologue. He is something near to a god, but not an ideologue at all.
All hail Mr. Tidybowl and the clean bathroom revolutionaries of Progress!
"Life tells. Who survives? Whose children are healthy? Who has healthy grandchildren? Ideology is for fools."
If I didn't know better I'd think this was written by a neanderthal.
The strongest survive? Murder the competition and their children? Why not just write that into our rule of law?
Ideology represents the social values that people share in society in peace. It is the basis for civilization.
We are only beginning to realize the social requirements for living in a global society.
Get with the program.
Rob, I don't think Dag is saying the physically strong alone survive; some strength may help, but it is basically ethical strength he is talking about. He is arguing that we should not equate "ideology" with human ethics more generally. Ideology is for him a rather narrow and artificial domain of thinking about the human, characterized by a refusal to ask certain questions that would lead to the collapse of the mental house of cards the ideologue has constructed.
But you're right that any suggestion that humanity can do without thinking and learning about itself is the fantasy that conformists always have to give up, sooner or later, usually with a lot of humiliation and violence if this is put off for too long.
More on the ongoing Kosovo conflict: there will be a protest against Kosovo's secession this Sunday (24 FEB) at 1:30 p.m., in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery. See this web site. It is one of a series of coordinated international protests on the same day.
Might be good for you to attend and popularize Covenant Zone by talking to people there.
I'll check it out. Thanks.
There is unity in conformity and division in diversity.
We should conform to our shared social values, the first of which is to continually improve them based on our changing knowledge of the truth.
If what Dag meant contradicts what he said, he can choose to be clear, or not.
I suspect that without all the rhetoric, clarity will show little originality.
I'd say we can have unity in diversity, but only if all agree that real diversity, not the purely rhetorical postmodern "diversity" (which is a form of thought conformity, albeit not a very successful one), requires each of us to show respect for an originary human unity (respect for our common humanity, for the origin of human culture in which we all share, and to which all cultures are genetically linked) and for the need to engage in a free exchange with a respect for further developing shared (originary) truths, and without thought police or religious dogmatists trying to dictate the terms of truths we can only further develop through free and honest exchange of our present differences.
"I'd say we can have unity in diversity, but only if all agree"
In other words diversity brings unity when people conform.
Surely you jest.
No, I don't jest. What' I'm saying is that there is a minimum price of admission, a minimal requirement for a diverse civic culture: one in which all people sign on to the need to recognize and respect each other's common humanity. Once we agree to share a basic civility and democratic spirit, then we can enjoy the fruits of the freedom that maximizes our potential for (individual) diversity.
On the other hand, one can have a certain kind of "diversity" gathered together by a multicultural empire in which the various subject peoples are not very free. But such empires are parasitic on the cultures they subject and they don't provide those cultures the means (political freedom) of creative renewal; thus unfree multicultural empires always collapse, sooner or later, and that is not really sustaining diversity in the long run.
True,
I'm not buying your obvious contradiction.
A society is defined by the shared culture and values. When we share something, we conform.
Your concept to simply "agree to share a basic civility and democratic spirit" is naive.
Issues like abortion, gender based discrimination and irresponsible promiscuity are pretty basic.
Are you suggesting that right and wrong be determined democratically? Then we wouldn't need lawyers, judges or rules, just voters. We would also be free to persuade them.
The fact is that civilization requires a higher authority, truth.
Until people conform to prioritize truth above all else, there will be no judging what is basic civility, no agreement and no unity.
I agree with you that civilization requires a commitment to truth; but how do we make this commitment if not through free and open exchange of ideas?
I'm not saying we don't need lawyers and judges; we do need them, in their proper place. We don't need them to take the lead in defining our relation to the truth; we need them to institutionalize that commitment, to a certain degree, once it has been fleshed out through free and open debate.
Then whenever there are new players they also deserve a voice and the debate begins anew.
When do we get to the agreement part?
Don't get me wrong, we should challenge and question our beliefs and values.
We just need to conform and share them until our quest for the dynamic truth exposes errors.
I suspect that when more of us do value the truth, we will need far fewer judges and lawyers.
I have a feeling that some people might confuse the idea of conformity hippies with the idea that law abiding citizens and sociable fellows are somehow the same; but if that's what I'd meant I would have saved myself a lot of effort in writing something altogether different just to have to go back and correct it all.
As should be completely clear from the illustration above, conformity hippies are a social clique of themselves who have little or nothing to do with society in general, even if, as some suggest, they are the government rulers of our day. They are conformists within their own intellectual bubble, and they are, in this day, conformists to a hippie world-view, leaving outside all consideration those who are not "part of the programme." Hence, the conformity hippies are lock-step anarchists, for example, little tyrannts who feed on each other and terrorize the semi-visible masses in much the same way as did late Medieval Scholastic heresy hunters at European universities. Nothing much changes. Ask Tynedale.
The point of what I write should be clear after all this time: that there are people who are dictatorial by nature, and they long for power because they are of that kind. Regardless of the nomenclature, they are innate fascists. If that alone were clear, I could have saved myself the past three years of writing on it daily. It is not self-evident, particularly to intelligent people who are smart enough to fool themselves with visions of idealistic chimmeras. Until I sit down and edit my magnum opus, the soon to be famous masterwork of our time, "The Romance and Counter-Enlightenment Origins of Left Dhimmi Fascsism", I recommend you to my blog at No Dhimmitude, not only having a clear if entirely lengthy argument of my thesis but including for the entertainment and delight of all even such things as "Dag's Poetry Corner." Yes, friends, I do it all for you.
I am personally delighted to see this translated in Turkish on the Internet. Is it special? I say, "You betcha!"
Being a gay porn star is a profession that most heterosexual men do for a living. I believe it is an art, every film is.
All of that is new to me. Thanks for your input.
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