"No one Innocent" - Roberto Luongo

A friend of ours has a beef with the pathetically-named "immigrant rights" group, "No One is Illegal". NOI is defending the right of entry to Canada of illegal migrants, like the recent boatload of Tamils. But where would NOI draw the line? Their name is mindless Utopianism - for starters, how can we have unlimited "legal" migration in a world of welfare states with their costly benefits that are given to all legal residents as "rights"? And I'm sure that No One is Illegal is also for welfare states and their economic viability.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that Roberto Luongo today wore a shirt with almost the opposite sentiment. Luongo announced today that he is giving up the Captaincy of the Vancouver Canucks hockey club - this after becoming the city's scapegoat (though not entirely without reason given his uneven performance in goal) for the team failing to go far in the Stanley Cup playoffs last year. Being a scapegoat of the group can teach you an important truth about our collective human nature - that there is nothing innocent in the collective, mimetic, process by which any group binds itself in opposition to what it singles out, more or less arbitrarily (but nonetheless meaningfully), to be in error.

Today Luongo went to the press conference with a shirt emblazoned "No one Innocent".
I salute your fashion sense, Roberto.

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..?

Free them or kill them: in the end will there be any other choice?

I got a laugh out of the scene in the film Downfall where Hitler, facing death in his Berlin bunker, decides to marry Eva Braun. They bring in a marriage commissioner who is on his bureaucratic best behaviour. At the appropriate point in the "ceremony", he asks for Hitler's certification of pure Aryan ancestry. Hitler doesn't have it. Goebbels breaks the pregnant pause... "But he's the Fuhrer!!?". The commissioner proceeds.

When antisemitism take over a people's minds, it drives them crazy and self-destructive; no matter how many you kill, there is always the need for another "Jew" or Zionist or Yankee blood sucker to confirm the rightness of the regime and one's personal identity; it becomes a mad quest: one cannot face up to and deal with one's resentment of the way the world is - with all its necessary differences - letting go of much of the uncreative resentment in good faith; one can only dive deeper into it. Hell, if Hitler had survived to lead some rump of hold-out Nazis in the Alps, Argentina, or somewhere, his followers may eventually have turned on him, discovering that he had deceived them because, they would conclude, he must have been at least part Jewish. Such is often the fate of those who step out of the mob and into history, by making some significant difference, good or bad.

I wonder if in the last of days, the Muslims will witness a similar marriage scene.

Cairo to Strip Citizenship from Men Who Marry Israelis - Defense/Middle East - Israel News - Israel National News

Cairo's High Court of Justice has upheld a lower court ruling that ordered the Interior Ministry to ensure that Egyptian men lose their rights if they marry Israeli wives.

Administrative Supreme Court Justice Mohammed al-Husseini handed down a decision Saturday that Egypt's Interior Ministry must ask the country's Cabinet to take what steps it must to strip citizenship from men married to Israeli women -- and from their children.

At present, Egyptians marrying Israelis are allowed to retain their Egyptian citizenship, and their children are automatically considered Egyptian citizens as well. The practice parallels that of the Muslim faith, in which custody of the children, and the religious faith, follows that of the father.
[...]
Al-Wahsh explained to the Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite news network that he wanted to prevent the creation of a generation who are “disloyal to Egypt and the Arab world.” The children of such marriages “should not be allowed to perform their military service,” he commented.

Al Jazeera reporter in Cairo, Rawya Rageh, commented that the case has “highlighted the divide between the official Egyptian stance on peace with Israel versus the real sentiment on the street of the Arab world's most populous nation.”
[...]
“It's not clear whether the Egyptian government will indeed enforce the verdict,” commented Rageh. “but for now, the verdict has quenched the thirst of many in an increasingly angry population seeking action against Israel.”

Ahh, but just as an Arab in the desert can never stop dreaming of water, and enemies, the only thing that will really cure Jew hatred is a conversion to the truth, the truth that the world, that any kind of possible social order, will always provoke some amount of resentment; and so if we want to progress as a culture or civilization, we will have to deal with this resentment without madhouse conspiracy theories that target those who are in some way different, or creative, unless we want forever to live in a madhouse of conspiracy and human sacrifice, which is where today's left-Islamic alliance now lives, as any cool reading of the movement to deny Israel's right and responsibility to defend itself from those who would destroy it now makes clear.

The resurrection and prominence given to the anti-Jewish blood libel by the recent MSM "reporting" of the Gaza attactivist flotilla is a very scary sign of things to come. The mob in the Arab and "Western" worlds will not be sated for long by one or another anti-Israel measure. They will still return to the desire to kill the Jew, i.e. to kill free societies with rational justice and economic systems; and if they ever get their way they will just have to find more "Jews" to kill, unless and until they can be converted to the truth, to good faith full of doubt and real thinking and not ritualistic certainties.

Humanity in future is going to have to revisit, I fear many times, the "neocon" or Lincolnian proposition that we cannot live with any kind of security in a global village that is half free and half slave. If the mad mobs of the Arab world are allowed to fester in self-righteous scapegoating, they will forever be in need of another victim to sacrifice to guarantee their unity, to forget, if only for a moment, all their internal tensions and resentments. We can feed them Israel, but it will not, cannot, stop there. They will forever project their internal resentments onto external enemies. And what will the rest of us have to do about it? Can we bottle them up, with real walls, without seeing many of them die (in populations that have grown through access to Western technology, trade, migration, to numbers that "Sharia economics" or isolated big man tyrannies can never support), thus provoking further our "white guilt"? And can we continue to let them into our Western world without also seeing many people killed through the growing irrationalism of the Islamist-left alliance, one that can never produce enough victims of "the Jews"/America to flaunt and to justify revenge against white guilt?

If we value life, we must face up to this historical challenge sooner rather than later.