Putting Choices In Perspective

"You have nobody to blame but yourself". In this day and age, is that advice still considered wise counsel?

A small confession. I possess a bad habit that I particularly regret, yet it's a bad habit that I've never been able to shake: I tend to talk over people after I've asked them a question, stepping on their answer instead of being patient and polite enough to wait my turn to listen and learn.

It's a natural problem I have. As frustrating as it is to admit, it seems to be in my nature to behave this way.

An admission that leads to this observation: just because something comes naturally, that does not make it welcome, that does ennoble it as "good". Shouldn't it be a sign of maturity, that we can grow to recognize how much the ability to do something is in itself not the justification for actually doing it..? Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should... even if it's something that comes naturally to us.

If we're truly committed to survival through self-improvement, shouldn't we search for when and where it makes sense to place ourselves at odds with our own nature? Could we not say, that the most worthwhile self-improvement can most readily come to us when we are at war with nature?

What is the true result of our natural behavior; for any individual aspiring to a more righteous life, this would be one of the hardest answers to perceive, requiring as it does a full measure of honesty, humility, and patience... qualities that tend to come rather unnaturally to the human species.

Looking back over a mis-spent life, I can see now, with painful clarity, how so many of my natural habits have hurt me. Was this an insight that needed so much time to come into focus?

The honest answer is no. But for too many years, I was at war with reality instead of being at war with nature. The real reason for my finding myself in my present situation can be found... in my mirror: in the accumulation of habits I've nurtured, and in the ones I've denied myself.

Can this be one of the dividing lines between the conflicting worldviews imperfectly labeled "left" and "right"? Does being "on the right" mean that I am now at war with nature, as when I used to be "on the left" meant that I was at war with reality?

When someone allows themselves the false belief that bad habits should produce good results, what happens when reality contradicts them? They either look inward, towards the history of their behavior, to perceive which of their chosen reactions, which of their natural habits, deserves the blame. Through this insight we can come to see the need for a second nature, a renewal of ourselves through the adoption of more fruitful behavior.

Or: they may deflect their gaze outward, where the only conclusion remaining in sight is to look to fix the blame upon the habits and behaviors of others. They are then looking for a scapegoat, an excuse that will enable them to engage in a false conflict, rather than the necessary one to be waged against their own inner nature.

So much for honesty. So much for humility. So much for reality.

As we review our reactions to the circumstances that life has dealt us, as we trace a line to connect the results that have arisen from our choices, which direction does the search lead us, where do we find ourselves looking: to a destination within, or without?

When we find ourselves soaking wet, can it really be someone else's fault that we chose to take a long walk off a short pier..?

Anyone want to infiltrate the next Vancouver hate rally with me?

How To Deal With Moonbat Protests : Israellycool

Left Turns On The Red Streets Of France

When I first moved to Vancouver I was struck by the street names of my new home. Some were named after battles of the Crimean War (“Alma St”, “Balaclava St”) and others from sources taken from British military history (“Trafalgar St”, “Hornby St”, “Bleinheim St”), attesting to the city’s ties to Mother England. There were several colorful names (“Dunsmuir St”, “Trutch St”, “Robson St”, “Cambie St”) that I would soon learn had their origin in local BC history. The city map itself provided a fun history lesson for this new guest, and I used it as a guide for more than just my navigation needs: it also gave me a sense of the history, the culture, the values, of my new home.

Fast forward to more recent times, and a revelation that occurred while blogging at Covenant Zone.

In what feels like another life, I used to blog regularly on the urban violence rocking France’s fractious suburbs. Early on I especially needed to rely upon internet maps to help me situate the scenes of the latest crimes I would read about, since “Seine-St-Denis” and “Clichy-sous-Bois” were place names I wasn’t yet familiar with.

I couldn’t help but notice that the neighborhoods I was researching seemed to contain several streets with familiar names indeed. I remember the first time this happened: “Avenue Salvador Allende?”, I read aloud from the tiny text on my computer screen. “The socialist Salvador Allende from Chile..? Well, France does have a left-leaning history…”

I didn’t know the half of it. Lately I’ve been indulging in some armchair traveling through the streets of Paris and its environs, thinking up historical personages and historical events and seeing if there's someone commemorating them in Paris' "banlieus rouges" ["red suburbs"]. Here’s a picturesque report highlighting the surprises that were in store for me, courtesy of GoogleMaps' mesmerizing street view feature.

What can we learn about a city, a people, from the names they choose for their streets? Let's take a left turn through the streets of some of the "sensitive zones" of suburban France, and look for some clues...

What's wrong with the Western left?

Starting from the observation that the editor-in-chief of the Times of Oman is justifying the Holocaust, Breath of the Beast asks a question often on our minds: how can the postmodern left justify its variously implicit and explicit alliance with the seventh-cum-twentieth century fascism of today's orthodox or radical Islam?

It is a longer blog post, but well-worth reading. I can't sum it up with a few quotes but I will say those who have recently been here to defend Edward Said might have a look. My take on it in the commments section at B of the B.

Sympathy For The Devil: Bill Ayers' Approval Rating

''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,'' says former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers in his 2001 book Fugitive Days.

When New York Times reporter Dinita Smith interviewed Ayers about his new book for an article published on September 11, 2001, he admitted:

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.''

...
He writes that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972.

Even more chilling was Ayers response to a question about whether he would bomb again.

''I don't want to discount the possibility,'' he said.

So what to make of a recent Rasmussen poll, identifying a number as large as 13% who can somehow hold "favorable" views about this callous, unrepentant terrorist bomber?

...
[William Ayers], now a college professor in Chicago, was part of a domestic terrorist group in the 1960s and remains unrepentant for his activities during that era. Just 13% of American voters have a favorable opinion of him while 62% hold an unfavorable view. Twenty-five percent (25%) don’t know enough to have an opinion either way.

Among political liberals, 25% have a favorable opinion of him while 44% give Ayers negative reviews. Seventy-three percent (73%) have an unfavorable opinion of Ayers, including 59% with a Very Unfavorable opinion.
...

It boggles the mind; after all that's been revealed about this awful man, there are still so many people who can, somehow, like him. Rasmussen tries to dampen the bad news by introducing it with a "just", but the revelation that "just" a little more than one out of ten Americans can find room to morally accomodate this man's evil is one out of ten too many.

Is this sympathy for the devil the result of their paying attention, and approving of what they learn? Or is this from not paying attention at all, reflecting simply the knee-jerk reaction of one out of four liberals that if Ayers also wants to spread the wealth around, then it follows by extention that he must be a fine fellow.

"And thus I clothe my naked villany
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil."
___ King Richard III (I, iii, 336-338)

Will Japan Become The Next France..?

Is an 80-year old novel, and the best-selling comic book adaptation of it, influencing a generation of Japanese youth to embrace the waiting arms of Japan's communist party?

What many young Japanese view as an erosion of their economic security and employment rights, combined with years of political stagnation, are propelling droves of them into the arms of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), the nation's fourth largest political party.

New recruits are signing up at the rate of 1,000 a month, swelling its ranks to more than 415,000. Meanwhile a classic proletarian novel is at the top of the best-seller lists, and communist-themed "manga" comics are enjoying soaring success.
...
And the job losses, financial insecurity and social dissatisfaction that are expected to go hand in hand with the current global credit crisis are expected to increase the ranks of the party further.
Spearheading the lurch to the Left are young Japanese in their twenties and thirties, who have become increasingly disillusioned with changes to employment laws which they blame for creating a climate of insecurity.
...
The [communist] party's charismatic chairman, Kazuo Shii, triggered a rush of new recruits with a rousing parliamentary speech attacking the "exploitation" of young workers, which has become cult viewing among young Japanese on video websites.
...
Another sign of the growing allure of the Left is the sudden surge in popularity of a classic Japanese novel, Kanikosen - the Crab-Canning Ship ­- about embattled factory workers who rise up against their capitalist oppressors.

Nearly eight decades after it was written by Takiji Kobayashi, a communist who was tortured to death for his political beliefs aged 29, its sales have leapt from a slow annual trickle of 5,000 to 507,000 so far this year, unexpectedly catapulting it to the top of the nation's bestseller lists.

A "manga" comic book depicting the same Marxist tale is also winning over young Japanese, with 200,000 copies sold in a year. Kosuke Maruo, editor at East Press, which publishes the manga version, said: "The story succeeds in representing very vividly the situation of the so-called working poor today.

"They cannot become happy and they cannot find the solution to their poverty, however hard they work. Young people who are forced to work for very low wages today may have a feeling that they are in a similar position to the crew of Kanikosen." Kyudo Takahashi, 31, a freelance writer from Tokyo, attributed the popularity of the story to a growing sense of displacement among his generation.

"Kanikosen was a textbook in school but we didn't read it seriously then," he said. "Now, we're reading it again because we're frustrated with the government.

"In the book, people are exploited again and again. They are not treated like humans, more like cows at a hamburger factory. That is how many people feel today. When we find work, someone is always exploiting us. We cannot feel secure about the future."

As we grow older, and live to see the death of our family and friends, humility should teach us that a tragic vision of life includes the reality that there can be no guarantees. People aren't perfect, therefore the systems they build, being imperfect extentions of their imperfect selves, will be flawed in their turn. People's reasonings, attitudes, and judgments, are as likely to fail as the light within them is likely to one day flicker, and dim. One day the candle goes out for each of us, in one way or another.

In a culture haunted by the specter of Karoshi , "death from overwork", lurking at one extreme, it is probably a natural, human reaction to swing to the opposite extreme, in order to perceive to be re-balancing the material world. They also see an emptiness within themselves and seek to fill it, they take their own lack of faith and project it onto the population as a whole, hoping that the state may bring about a new man, one filled with faith in his fellow men, that each shall share willingly of the fullness of their abilities, to each according to the least of their needs... or else.

Who decides these needs, or the extent of these abilities, who is the new super-man with sufficient brilliance that his light of reason will never fade? Who is this infallible God walking the earth whose will is forged of such perfect wisdom that it should replace our own? I can only hope the marxist Japanese start asking themselves the same questions that I once asked of myself, when I threw away my red books and false hopes in a rising sun that would shine on new men... that they start learning how to love the flawed fool they see in their mirror, and teach him how to put faith in himself.

Enraged Obama Fan Beats Woman With Stick For Supporting McCain In NY

He beat her with a stick. He saw her McCain signs, and that was enough to make him go berserk. She was a petite, middle-aged woman volunteering for the McCain/Palin ticket, and this big tough Obama supporter took her measure, and evidently decided: "There's only one response to this". And so on Lexington Street, in mid-town Manhattan, on September 15 of this year, he ended up beating her over the head with a stick because of her political views.

Pajamas Media carries the story today, including the district attorney’s complaint:

“Defendant grabbed the sign [informant] was holding, broke the wood stick that was attached to it, and then struck informant in informant’s face thereby causing informant to sustain redness, swelling, and bruising to informant’s face and further causing informant to sustain substantial pain.”

The Silent Majority gives more details of the victim's side of the story:

“He tore up a McCain campaign sign (unprovoked) and then took the stick from the sign and HIT me across the side of my head and face when I reached for our sign.
...
I reached for the torn sign and he started beating me with the stick about my head and face as I tried to stop the blows with my right hand.
While I put my glasses back on my face, the attacker and started down the stairs to the subway. I followed him yelling that he should be stopped. He grew calm and stopped only when he saw that I had found two police officers at the end of the stairs to the subway. I pursued him even though I was still stunned from the attack. I had been hit across the head and face with a stick by a red-in-face stranger who was screaming “You people are ridiculous” (Over and over.)”

Imagine what his reaction will be should Obama lose in November...

Obamanation

Wolf Howling: Obama, Criminalizing Politics & Thinking The Unthinkable raises the question of whether the American left is preparing to put the Bush administration on trial for "war crimes". The left's ongoing descent into victim politics and the attempt to criminalize opposition to their death cult is frightening to anyone who remembers the conditions for a free society and for duly elected historical actors who would think to bring new and liberating paradigms in international law into existence. The left, of course, want the world to be ruled by Harvard law school versions of Saddam Hussain: you can't do that, nothing new, too risky; just keep paying for the parade of victims of the present system.

Meanwhile U.S. News & World Report is apparently erasing many comments from its site, because readers are making unflattering remarks about this O-holy sign


One Nation, Under a New Obama Salute - Washington Whispers (usnews.com)

Only a "Black" candidate can today have that kind of sign. Even if, say, the Nobel Oracle, Al Gore, were back in Presidential politics and had one like it people would mock him to death. But all those with nostalgia for a more ritually compact and Gnostic culture represented through the highest office of the secular state find Obama appealing because his victimary blackness allows him to claim a cultural centrality that no member of the race deemed free can any longer claim without allegations of megalomania. But African-Americans cannot be denied their "FDR" or "JFK" moment, even if that moment has passed for the society in the vanguard of human freedom. This is how we "liberate" people in the fallen postmodern age of tribal culture cult.