Infantile Sexualism: The Auto-Metonumia of Pornography

"Nothing is more exotic than the world around us, nothing more fantastical than Sachlichkeit." Egon Erwin Kisch, Der Rasende Reporter, (1924.) 1.

Paraphilia is sexual deviation or perversion. Paraphilia includes fantasy, behavior, or sexual urges fixated on objects, activities, or situations. One kind of paraphilia is form fetishism, as opposed to model fetishism. It is the "model" of the form fetish that intrigues me this dull day. It is "The Real" as part transformed and represented as the whole that intrigues me, the reissuing of the being itself as not the being, as the presentation behind which hides the unreal, undeveloped real.

In the world of publicity one must be seen to be known as attractive enough to warrant a mate. In the state of privacy everyone can be Dag. And then there is the compromise, the twilight zone of form fetish and the elaborate dissolution of privacy in a mock publicity.

From sacerdotal profanities to the sacred anecdotal, our magic rites become private form fetishes of publicity, of death and decay for sport and profit. To make a plain example: A fat girl works as a stripper in a tavern. She is the comedy act. She takes off her clothes in a semi-public place and makes jokes about her appearance and her sex life. People laugh at her jokes while they are sickened by her bodily appearance. In the audience is a young man in shiny jack-boots, a long black leather trench coat, and a black eye-patch. In the audience are others who look like they have spent days preparing their elaborate costumes for their hour upon this stage they'll never reach. Take your pick, any costume will do. Try to be respectful because this is, after all, a church, and the congregants are taking communion.

The form fetishist needs for his needs the objective form in hand, as it were. He needs, not the person, but the person as part of the person in hand, i.e. a thing to hold and think on, a boot, for example, perhaps with a person inside it. The wearer? "I am a shiny boot!" Look at that worm squirm. That part stands for the whole, and the communion of believers accept it in the flesh. The part is the whole. Magnificat anima mea Dominum.

'What seems to be me is not me. I am a Sorites Paradox before you.'

The Sorites Paradox of The Parable of the Hooded Man goes thus: 'Do you know your father? Yes. Is that him? Yes. No, it is a man in a hood who looks from a distance like your father.'

Some people dress up and pretend they are what they wear, and that attracts perhaps those who are attracted to the object, the thing worn and the thing wearing. "Oh, object of my heart's desire, I've longed to pretend on you for an age!' Doing it alone, not so cool. Stepping out of the shower and looking in the mirror, maybe not good at all. So, the tattoos. The focus, the deflection. The object of magic that transforms one into a part representing the whole. They pretend they are what they look like in part.

This idea. This issue. This ideology. This piece of chatter picked up from the internet. This blah-blah. This Palestinians. This I hate the Israelis. This Save the Poor. This yaya.

I'm sometimes stricken by the pornographic presentation of the people I meet. They do it to themselves in the hope I'll be deceived by the Sorites Paradox of the tattooed fat girl. No, that doesn't work very often. I usually see a tattooed fat girl. Silly me, I take the person as the whole person, even if they demand that I reduce them to the deflection. When people want to be attractive to others and find they just aren't, some find compensatory tactics to make themselves happier than they might otherwise be if shut out from the communion of lost souls. I don't care. Some are genuine fetishists who do as they do because it's what they do. I don't care. Don't sit on my couch, don't join my communion. Find your own and do as you will. Don't expect me to pretend with you.

Some people are so fragile they cannot stand to be seen as they are, for otherwise they would break into shards and splinters. I can't help it. I don't even care. I don't even pretend to. And some are so desperate for attention that they intrude into the publicity they so much fear: they become models in the eternal world of photographs, the dead undying. Some display themselves in our shared publicity as an image representing their wholeness, as if we are fooled. The image lasts, and the part and the whole remain private anyway. All that remains is evidence of a fake.

Some people are into diapers, and what can you say? Some demand the rest of us play the same game or suffer. I'm not that likely to reduce myself to the part. I'm not that into being a pornographic model of someone else's need for form. Some are. Auto-metonumia isn't for me.

Magnificat anima mea Dominum.

It's simple: some people can't figure out how to attract a mate, and they get lonely. They try something to make themselves presentable while still reserving the right not to be criticized for who they are. It don't work. The person is still the whole person, good, bad or ugly. No tattoos, no nothing makes the difference. Some are strange, and so what? But those who make themselves diminished, that has less than appeal. And such is much of our modern Western world. I see it for what it is, and it's increasingly fetishistic and phony.

Stop doing that to my leg.

1. From Frederick J. Schwartz, "Form Follows Fetish: Adolph Behne and the Problem of Sachlichkeit," Oxford Journal of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1998; v.21, n.2, p. 47.

Black Day for Arrogant Entrepreneurs (and all who benefit from what they create)

The popular wisdom is that Conrad Back is an arrogant man who must be guilty because he shows contempt for ordinary people, their regulated lives and their (arrogant) envies, and has an evident passion for power, wealth, and above all, status. This only begs the question of what is he guilty, if the kind of media business he made possible was only possible with such a man at its head, something the various grey-suited investment funds who now portray themselves as Black's victims must surely have known when they first bedded him. Is the world and its conflicts really very often reducible to clear-cut victims and victimizers, or does application of the postmodern scapegoating logic only create its own further losers? Nothing has done more to ruin investments in Black business than has Black's prosecution, raising the legitimate doubt that protection of shareholders, and not marketplace resentment, is at the heart of the matter. Protecting shareholders is not, admittedly, synonymous with upholding the law, but should we prosecute people when doubts about the existence of obvious victims is better mediated by civil litigation?

At first, Black's investors, largely anonymous corporate players, needed such a man, good at trading horses (though only good as long as he didn't have to wear and live the life of a grey flannel suit); but when they felt he crossed them, probably slept around, and wrangled more from their partnership than they thought he deserved, breaking or bending the rules of the horse track along the way, they found they could bring him down, with the help of the bureaucratic elite's favourite criminal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. But it turns out, somewhat like Scooter Libby, Black was really brought down, for obstruction of justice, by his apparent ass-covering actions after the prosecutorial process had commenced. Is he the business equivalent of an adulterer being criminally charged for beating his wife? More thoughts below on whether American justice is taking lessons from the Chinese Communist party.

Alykhan Velshi, writing in September 2006:

The trial by attrition of Conrad Black has exposed the dark underbelly of the legal system, where the government can ruin a man, take his property, his means of livelihood, and make him a social pariah – all without the hassle of securing a conviction. There is an insidious little worm that has crept into the legal system, an iconoclastic mentality that is distorting the rule of law. Focused less on securing justice than on bringing down the high and mighty, all the while pandering to the politics of envy, it affects the entire system of corporate governance.

This is highlighted by four developments in the law of corporate governance: the concentration of power in the hands of minority shareholders, the criminalization of technical regulatory violations, the abandonment of the rule of law in favor of aggressive prosecutorial tactics, and the entrenchment of a culture that penalizes success.
[...]
In 2003, just as his legal troubles were beginning, Black published a laudatory biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In it, Black acknowledged that the New Deal probably prolonged the Great Depression, but countered that it preserved the credibility of the market economy at a time when unemployment was more than 30% and there was a genuine crisis of capitalism. There is a certain cruel irony in Black's praise of the New Deal, because there is a direct line from the New Deal to Black's current woes.

The New Deal's creation of the regulatory state – where Congress delegated much of its law-making power to specialist executive agencies – has through the effluxion of time resulted in regulatory agencies making the rules, defining their scope and, in some cases, actually enforcing them. Conrad Black, whatever his views on the New Deal’s golden legacy, is today in the crosshairs of its golden shower: what would previously have been civil wrongs punished by a fine are now criminal offenses, and Black is a latter-day Joseph K.

For example, Black's decision to turn down a salary increase (which is taxable as income) and instead accept the payment of management and non-compete fees (which are, if arranged competently, not taxable as income) resulted in tax evasion charges being filed against him, as well as serious criminal charges for violating corporate securities laws. That is to say, a technical, and probably innocent, tax and disclosure violation suddenly became a Very Big Deal. Through the New Deal's looking glass, regulatory violations receive a similar punishment as serious crimes.

Some have argued that not punishing corporate criminals undermines faith in global capitalism; well, so do windfall profits, CEOs earning seven figure salaries, and high gasoline prices – yet we do not criminalize these things. Corporate crime, frankly, is often a matter of question begging, that is to say, the criminalization of things which ought not to have been crimes in the first place. There are many criticisms one can level at someone who manages his affairs to minimize tax liability and in the process neglects the fiduciary duties he owes to his company, but calling these actions criminal, and seeking to punish them with jail-time, is a massive overreaction. A good rule of thumb is that unless a CEO's conduct falls within traditional concepts of “fraud”, “embezzlement”, “larceny”, and so on, we should proceed with caution when creating new and vague criminal offenses.
[...]
Much of Black's troubles stem from the fact that he and his wife led a lavish lifestyle. Reading through the Hollinger reports that fault him for corporate mismanagement, this seems to be the source of most of the anger directed his way. However, this grievance is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Hollinger brand used to be. As David Asper, Vice-President of CanWest Global Communications Corp, once explained: “If Lord Black ever decided to sell his interest in Hollinger, it is he – and not Hollinger – with which we did not wish to compete.” Hollinger was merely a means for Conrad Black to exert influence over his newspapers – replacing staff, changing the editorial slant, and improving the overall quality of the writing and reporting.

This is why maintaining Black's public persona was so important: he harkened back to the good old days of grand newspaper proprietors, family dynasties, and concern for the value of the brand rather than vulgar things like day-to-day movements in share prices. In most publicly traded companies, there is no correlation between the success of the company and the extravagance of the chief executive. I do not know who the CEO of Lucent Technologies is, and even if I did, it would not bother me one way or another whether he liked Paganini or knew that Josh Bell could not play in tune on the violin.

Hollinger, by contrast, was more like Donald Trump's corporate empire. Success depended on the image it projected and the status of its chairman. It is precisely because Donald Trump maintains a lavish lifestyle, keeps an absurd coiffe, and has a wife that looks like the arm candy every sexless beta male lusts after, that Trump condominiums sell at a premium. Likewise with Conrad Black, that grand but somewhat dandyish social climber. Paul Fussell, author of Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, would have said that Black’s futile attempt to be “upper class out of sight” spoke to the deepest longings and insecurities of the middle class. The Hollinger brand was built around Black’s persona, which may be why, with Black no longer at the helm, it is nothing more than a holding company for a variety of underperforming newspapers.

It does not take a devotee of Ayn Rand's doorstop screeds to appreciate the dangers of punishing the creative entrepreneurial class in a company built around their success. In fact, as Rand would have predicted, nearly all ex-Hollinger publications have experienced some sort of decline, whether in quality or in circulation, since Black left the newspaper business.

It is too easy to liken Conrad Black to Ken Lay and Hollinger to Enron. However seductive, this comparison should be resisted. The Enron fraud resulted in a massive loss of shareholder wealth and the financial ruin of many families, and it was caused by a deliberate attempt to misreport financial statements to perpetrate a fraud. The Hollinger affair, by contrast, has resulted in no shareholder bankruptcies, was not based on a fraud about the company's financial health, and has only impoverished its former chairman. Like mistaking a donnybrook for a pogrom, we lose our sense of proportion when we compare Hollinger to Enron.

Black's mistake was that he ran Hollinger as if he owned it when, in fact, he only owned a controlling stake. Black ignored the fact that shareholders and directors owe special legal and equitable duties to one another, as well as to the company. But this mistake is not criminal, and it does not justify the punitive lawsuits being filed against him, the pre-trial seizure of his assets, or the damage being done to his reputation.

Mark Steyn, writing today:

There will be recriminations a-plenty over what was just announced on the 12th floor in Chicago. Conrad Black was found NOT GUILTY of racketeering, NOT GUILTY of tax fraud, NOT GUILTY of the CanWest scheme, NOT GUILTY on Bora Bora, the Park Avenue apartment and Barbara's birthday party, NOT GUILTY on the individual non-competes on US newspaper sales.

He has been found GUILTY in just two narrow areas - "obstruction of justice" re the security camera footage of him removing boxes from 10 Toronto Street, and three "mail fraud" counts relating to the APC non-compete agreement, in which (as the government argued) Black and Radler paid Black and Radler not to compete with Black and Radler. As I argued here and here, those were always the easiest charges to shoot for if you wanted to convict on something. It speaks very poorly for Black's legal representation that the best argument against the APC charges was made by David Radler and the best argument against the obstruction count was made to me over a cup of tea by Barbara Amiel.

The government alleged three schemes - the "US scheme", the "CanWest scheme", the "perks scheme" - and upgraded them to racketeering, and threw in tax fraud. They lost on racketeering and tax. They lost outright on two-thirds of the schemes. And on the remaining scheme - the "US scheme" - they lost on everything but the APC non-compete fee. Yet, absent successful appeals, four men could be spending the rest of their working lives in jail. The US Attorney's office might usefully adopt as its motto the IRA's message to Mrs Thatcher after the Brighton bombing, "You have to be lucky every time. We only have to be lucky once."

Casting out "evil"

Covenant Zone, having recently been the target of apotropaic gestures (e.g. we're apparently a "sh*t hole") from a certain lefty site that will go unnamed, I want to link today to Lee Harris' new essay at Tech Central Station that shows us what an apotropaic gesture is. Discussing the recent incident in Pakistan where Islamic fundamentalists took over the Red Mosque, and vowed to fight the government to the death, Harris asks why the Western media comes up with all kinds of euphemisms for describing the fanatics in the Red Mosque.

In Islam, fanatical zeal has been looked upon as both the ethical and theological virtue par excellence. Furthermore, it has been the agent by which the religion of Muhammad came to dominate the hearts and minds of so much of the world. Fanatical zeal is not a pathology of Islam; it is the glue that has held it together. It was the agent that created the original community of the faithful, all of whom had first to reject the tribal identities they were born and raised with, in order to accept their radically new identity as followers of the Prophet—a profound psychological transformation that could only be brought up by fanatical commitment to their new way of life.

The same commitment also explains the amazing success with which Islam was spread in the first hundred years of its existence. Indeed, without grasping the vital role that fanaticism has historically played in Islam, neither its successful birth nor its far more spectacular spread would make sense. The religion of the Prophet was not a religion for the lukewarm, the skeptical, the wishy-washy, the moderate, or the reasonable. If it had been, we would never have heard of it, because it would have been almost immediately absorbed back into the tribal milieu that had long dominated every aspect of life in the Arab peninsula.

The same spirit of fanaticism is at the heart of the battle over the Red Mosque. Yet, despite its absolute centrality to the drama, we in the West are largely reluctant even to speak of it as a factor. Reuters and the AP can bring themselves to refer to Ghazi and his "supporters" as "militants," but they go to considerable pains to avoid calling them by the name that alone truly fits them.

For many, there is a simple explanation of this omission. Reuters and AP are trying to be politically correct. But how convincing is this explanation? Why is it that a word like "fanatic" is treated as being politically incorrect in the first place? If fanatics are proud of their fanaticism, if it is their boast and their glory, then why not call them by the proper term?

In my new book, The Suicide of Reason, I offer an explanation of why so many are reluctant to use the word fanatic to denote those, like Ghazi and his "supporters," are behaving precisely in the same way that all fanatics have behaved through history. "The problem with much of the Western response to Islamic fanaticism," I write, "is that our refusal to use the word fanaticism appears to be based on our reluctance to recognize the fact of fanaticism. We avoid the word in order to avoid having to think about the thing, thereby leaving the impression that our resistance to acknowledging fanaticism arises less from our sensitivity to Muslim feelings than from our wish to evade the momentous challenged posed by fanaticism itself."

When we use words like supporter in place of follower, and militant in place of fanatic, we are engaging in verbal apotropaism—a rare, but helpful word that is defined as "the performance of magic ritual or incantatory formulas to avert evil." When people who really believe in the Devil call him by an affectionate term like Old Nick, they are using an apotropaic device. Instead of running the risk of calling the Devil by his right name, and having him suddenly appear with horns and tail, they refer to him by a less threatening title, one that sounds positively endearing. In short, human beings have always used apotropaic rituals and formulas to ward off that which we fear the most; and we in the West are still doing it today.

In The Suicide of Reason I write that in the contemporary West fanatics like Abdul Rashid like Ghazi and his followers have become "incomprehensibly alien to us. They do not conform to our expectation of normal human behavior; indeed, they shatter all such expectations. They fill us with panic and anxiety....To relieve this panic and anxiety we must either ignore them or else force them to fit into a category of human action with which we do feel comfortable—all in an effort to make their uncanniness less threatening to our comfortable vision of the world." Both Reuters and the AP exhibit the second reaction to the fanatic: by using words like supporter and militant both are attempting to make the incomprehensibly alien something that we think we are familiar with. After all, aren't we supporters of one candidate or other. Aren't there many things that we act militantly about? We have causes, too, for which we are prepared to fight: rights for blacks, or women, or gays. So where is the big difference between us? What is there so special about the behavior of Ghazi and his supporters that we should find it inexplicable, much less threatening?

Because we insist on denying what is most obvious and most essential about fanatics, namely, their fanaticism, we blind ourselves to the radical threat they pose to any established and settled order. For example, Pakistan under General Musharraf falls far short of our Western notions of a free and open society, but few in the West would be happy to see his regime replaced with a new Taliban—and one armed with nuclear weapons. Few in the West would be willing to see Pakistan plunged into civil war and/or anarchy. Yet the same cannot be said of the Pakistanis themselves. Abdul Ghazi, his followers, and those who sympathize with his cause throughout Pakistan would no doubt like to impose a Taliban-like government for their nation, as their record makes clear.
[...]
the ultimate outcome of the train of events set off this last week at the Red Mosque is still unknown, though we in the West are perfectly aware that if the spark turns into a conflagration there will be virtually nothing we can do to stop. Again, we can only stand by, and watch. Yet, if we are prepared to take a serious and unflinching look at the challenge posed to us by Islamic fanaticism, then at least we will be able to watch with vigilance and intelligence, and not fall prey to the illusion that we have solutions to a threat that we in the West have as yet barely began to understand.

If there is one thing a Covenant Zone exists to do, it is to see reality clearly, to avoid our need to engage in rituals of casting out evil, without bothering to understand what evil, in all its tortured humanity, is. Only then can a people hope to get the upper hand on the forces of evil through a self-sacrificing love for humanity and our (e.g. national) covenants. Of course, many on the left today will not even recognize the anthropological legitimacy of the term "evil". So they will not be too busy covenanting.

I wanted to link today to a blog post I read yesterday in which was discussed the phenomenon of "Muslim Background Believers"; it was at this url which has presently gone under password protection: http://blog.siena.org/2007/07/wider-window-on-world.html . An "MBB" is someone of Muslim background who has converted to Christianity. Apparently, while unheard of a couple of decades ago, there are now unknown thousands of them in Saudi Arabia, living in a secret culture, in fear for their lives, but nonetheless living a covenant with the help of a few missionary outsiders. Covenants, where we guarantee ourselves, e.g., to support those freedom lovers under the thumb of tyranny, are a way of bringing a new reality into being. And since I have criticized Christians in the past for turning a blind eye to what happens to their co-religionists in Muslim countries, I wanted to link to a Christian who isn't, who has gone for many years now right into one of the most oppressive societies to keep faith with those who desire freedom through Christ.

Given that this blog has apparently stirred up resentments and apotropaic gestures at another, more popular blog here in Vancouver, I cannot guarantee that our meeting tonight, as every Thursday, 7-9pm in the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library, in front of Blenz Coffee, will go off without incident. Covenant Zone is committed to free and rational conversation in the name of constructing a new, more open, reality than the one in which many of our co-citizens presently live. We will defend this commitment as best we can so that all who are interested in free and open conversation, without threats, scapegoats, or ritualistic castings out of misrepresented evil, will feel at home in the Covenant Zone.

Infantile Nihilism.

Even the hermit has his publicity, he being "The Hermit." And all have privacy, it being an impenetrable cave of seclusion from the light of knowledge. The covered body is not a privacy and neither is the secretive mind, all being open to others to an extent, if only by extrapolation. It's a matter of over-lapping degree: I cannot know another truly, and yet I can know all there is to know of the most hidden mind because even the most insane and unique is still Human. Mostly I and the world do not care, being absorbed in private matters and concerns that barely touch on the lives of others. With age the distance grows. Privacy is indifference; publicity is indifference. Within the mosaic of Humanness, one tessera is as important as another, and none less so. Every man's death diminishes me, and I shrug. The bell tolls, and I continue on my private path unconcerned.

I see people in my appointed daily rounds, glancing at this one or that, and giving them little heed, sensing them as there, and moving on. When one is hit by lightening, I stop and smile, and then I move on anyway. When a friend close suffers, I grieve, but it's a private matter, situated within the realm of publicity but tenuously, a drop in the ocean of the universal. I am contained and bound within by my identity and my privacy therein. I have my private notebook of responses for this or that occasion. It's large and it's got many pages still to be filled, more to add should the pages run out. But it's based from front to back on a single thesis. All the pages rest on a foundation. That foundation is private, alone for me to consult or to disregard as I will, but always there and immovable, one I might stumble against or bang my head on. It is solid and it will outlast my privacy. I see people, I move around them, I step over them, I might even step on them; but I seldom ever step off the path of the private life I have. I'm not stopping at Vanity Fair. I have my own places to go and things to do and life to live. So do others, though they often seem to think I must follow them regardless. I do refer to others, men such as Eric Hoffer who claims that those with no business of their own to mind will soon mind yours. No, I go as I will, alone if I need. It's private. Anyone who cares to can likely watch me as I do my daily dues. It's all public.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. Many seem to mistakenly believe that protruding privacies on the public is a matter of legitimate publicity, while in fact it's a public nuisance, an invasion of the privacy of others. Protagoras might well happily exclaim "All is vanity, there is nothing new under the Sun."

It is a matter of indifference if a 20 year old boy turns his smiling face to me in the evening and shows his pale visage covered in tribal tattoos. Not my business what he does to his face. That's a private matter. Perhaps his inner foundation is sandy, but it's not my concern. That he's turned himself inside out is maybe too bad but another day will erase him from my memory. He makes no lasting impression. What is of deep concern to me is the problem of inside out society, the publicity we share, like it or no like it. That society's face is marred and it's personality is baseless, that is the problem of our publicity that concerns me as a traveler. I don't care what individuals do, it not being my business for the most part. All the public displays of privacies don't phase me in the least. The lack of privacies within our collective publicities is a problem that concerns me much. A baseless idiocy, the Greek "idiocy" that is the storm of blank leaves flying across the mindscape, that concerns me.

I'll be sitting at the Vancouver Public Library in the atrium this evening from 7-9:00 p.m. near the Blenz coffee bar. It's a public place, though when I occupy a table it becomes a private matter of my space. You might be welcome to sit and join me. Come. Find out.

Is moral relativism really all that the Left are about?

I often berate the moral and cognitive relativism that pervades our public culture today. So, in a recent essay, does Victor Davis Hanson. But in saying this I think he (and often I) is missing a point:

Is “ho”—the rapper slang for the slur “whore”—a bad word? Always, sometimes, or just when an obnoxious white male like Don Imus says it? But not when the equally obnoxious Snoop Dogg serially employs it?

Is the Iraq war, as we are often told, the “greatest mistake” in our nation’s history?

Because Israel and the United States have a bomb, is it then O.K. for theocratic Iran to have one too?

Americans increasingly cannot seem to answer questions like these adequately because they are blissfully uneducated. They have not acquired a broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history.

Sometime in the 1960s—perhaps due to frustration over the Vietnam War, perhaps as a manifestation of the cultural transformations of the age—the university jettisoned the classical approach [to education] and adopted the therapeutic.Instead, our youth for a generation have been fed a “Studies” curriculum. Fill in the blanks: Women’s Studies, Gay Studies, Environmental Studies, Peace Studies, Chicano Studies, Film Studies, and so on. These courses aim to indoctrinate students about perceived pathologies in contemporary American culture—specifically, race, class, gender, and environmental oppression.

Such courses are by design deductive. The student is expected to arrive at the instructor’s own preconceived conclusions. The courses are also captives of the present—hostages of the contemporary media and popular culture from which they draw their information and earn their relevance.

The theme of all such therapeutic curricula is relativism. There are no eternal truths, only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority. Once students understand how gender, race, and class distinctions are used to oppress others, they are then free to ignore absolute “truth,” since it is only a reflection of one’s own privilege.

But clearly, what Hanson is saying is that the Left do believe in one eternal truth: that truth is a reflection of power and authority, and conversely of those whom power victimizes (when, in fact, truth is really something that transcends self-interested calculation because truth is what belongs to an open-ended politics whose collective logic cannot be reduced to privileged interests, or to victimization, but only to shared needs and possibilities for keeping our politics and people alive, free and open - and this is what we need a disinterested academy to explain and explore).

In other words, when it comes to fingering the bad guys, to promoting their party line, the Left is anything but relativistic. Bush is evil and that's really all you need to know, just like Israel is bad. So, the flipside of the kind of shiftless thinking that Hanson describes, the product of an academic humanities culture that is now more devoted to networking than to amassing real knowledge (what now matters in building an academic career is who you know, not what you know), is the production of young people who are increasingly reliant on scapegoats and victims to describe the world in which they live. See www.beyondrobson.com for examples. And they hold to these scapegoats and victimary figures, not only in a spirit of relativism, but increasingly of religious certainty. That is why we apparently now have supposedly educated elites convincing themselves that the kind of antisemitic cartoons discussed in our previous post, are somehow cutting and daring, speaking to truths about power and privilege that no one previously dared emit.

The smarmy, faux-intellectual, endless irony of the academy pretends to be all so worldy wise (see, e.g., Simon Schama's presently-running, on PBS, tv progam on Art). Yet today's academy, despite (or because of) the origins and home of many of its performers, is structurally antisemitic and anti-American; the irony and relativism becomes, when fully played out, just obeisance to so much sacrificial violence.

The Hezbollahization of Quebec goes Mainstream Media

Canada’s Cartoon Controversy | The Brussels Journal
I don't know what's more frightening: seeing these cartoons that were published in Quebec's leading newspapers some weeks ago, or just learning about them now via the Brussels Journal. How come I have heard nothing about this in the English Canadian media, which I modestly follow? A country that allows the antisemitic sickness to fester unchallenged will allow its real enemies to destroy itself before long. Of course, the problem is that liberal Canadians are no longer shown how to judge and to know the difference between enemy and friend of modern freedom and civilization. For our national elite, even to raise such a question is to reveal a right-wing racist thought proclivity. But a return to mainstream antisemitism, and all the deadly delusions that go with it, is a sure sign of the ultimate failure of multicultural moral relativism, and possibly of Quebec nationalism for that matter (though if they keep this up, I hope they will get lost - but could fostering an anti-Quebec backlash from civilized Canadians be the secret wish of members of Quebec's nationalist media class?).

I'll kill ten innocent bystanders for that remark!

There are in our world today three broad categories of Muslims, the so-called "moderate Muslims" not making the numbers to muster the count: Those three categories are the ulema, the takfiris, and the mob. The latter two groups are enraged. The first, as usual, slumber dogmatically. BOOM goes London, BOOM Par-ee. Whence the rage?

I woke in the middle of the night last week with the idea of "infantile rage." I consulted Dr. Wolf, below, for advice. Amazingly he was right there on the Internet as soon as I thought up the question. It's often like that. There are any number of approaches to our problems if only we would give up our cliched certainties in favor of looking for informed opinion. The good doctor's informed opinion was only useful to me in parts, thus parts below, with not much in the way of apologies from me for my incisive surgery on his work. Since I've hacked away at his work one might feel rightly that he deserves unedited viewing. For God's sake, Jim, he's a doctor! not a magician! So I cut to the bones to get to the essence as I view it, that the Muslim world is in a state of infantile rage; and I use the authority of the doctor below to give legitimate foundation to my argument.

It might be obvious but I am not a parent. I cannot write with any authority at all of children. I can, however, write of infantile rage from some experience in the world. And you can grasp it easily. You needn't be a doctor to see the rage in the Islamic world, and you needn't even be half-bright to recognize it as a tantrum.

There are very few mature adults in the Islamic culture. Islam is an infantile culture. Those Westerners who support its demands are those same whom Lenin in his highest wit refers to as the "Infantile Left." (Attend to those who know.) Of the emotionally and socially and morally retarded geriatric ulema there need be little written here or anywhere else. They are the classic example of "educated fools," and if you should doubt, then AskTheImam. Our concern must be with the remaining two groups of Muslims and their philobarbarist cheerleaders in the West, our darling Leftists.

Cartoon Rage? The ulema, absorbed in bitter discussion of the evils of djinns dancing on the heads of pins, could hardly manage to detach themselves from their nargilas long enough to issue some smoking death fatwas. No, no, the problem of all is not the good doctors of Islamic law but the enraged umma lead by an enraged intelligentsia this side of senility, i.e. the jihad-bent takfiris.

Huh-what?

Put it this way: The Stalinists of the ulema face the Maos and his sea of little Red Guards. Stalin's not pure enough? Then call in Mao who'll whip up a rage of frenzied murder to make things perfect for the few who might survive to scrounge around for roots and berries in the aftermath. Takfiris, to whom no one is Islamic enough but themselves. Why do Leftist love these people? Because the takfiris are the Communists of our day. The words change but the religion is the same. The dogma of the West Left is: "I hate my parents and I don't wanna grow up." Hey, suits me too but I don't kill anyone over it. then again, I'm a really boring guy. I don't have thousands of friends all over the world doing important stuff like fighting for freedom and stuff. Lucky for you, friend.

Enough already of this introduction. I'll see you again at the bottom of the doctor's presentation, beaten with a rubber truncation as it is.

Ernest S. Wolf, MD., “Group Helplessness and Rage,” Self Psychology Bulletin Board. Chicago, IL.

This paper originally was delivered at the International Self-Psychology Symposium in Dreieich, Germany, May, 2001. It is published here for the first time.

[….]

Talking about rageful behavior [Heinz Kohut] observed that underlying the rage one often finds an uncompromising insistence on the perfection of the idealized other. The infant experiences itself still in a state of [feeling] limitlessness [of] power and knowledge, a state that we as outsiders deprecatingly call the child’s grandiosity…. [W]hat looks like an adult …really is a very shakily put together oversensitive and shame-prone narcissist. The fanaticism of the need for revenge and the unending compulsion of having to square the account after an offense are therefore not the attributes of an aggressivity that is integrated with the mature purposes of the ego - on the contrary, such bedevilment indicates that the aggression was mobilized in the service of an archaic grandiose self and that it is deployed within the framework of an archaic perception of reality. The shame-prone individual who is ready to experience setbacks as narcissistic injuries and to respond to them with insatiable rage does not recognize his opponent as a center of independent initiative with whom he happens to be at cross-purposes. Aggression, when employed in the pursuit of maturely experienced causes, are not limitless. However vigorously this aggression is mobilized, is aim is limited and definite: the defeat of the enemy who blocks the way to a cherished goal. As soon as the aim is reached, the rage is gone.

The narcissistically injured on the other hand, cannot rest until he has blotted out a vaguely experienced offender who dared to oppose him, to disagree with him, or to outshine him. ..It can never find rest because it can never wipe out the evidence that has contradicted its conviction it is unique and perfect. This archaic rage goes on and on and on. Furthermore, the enemy who calls forth the archaic rage of the narcissistically vulnerable is seen by him not as an autonomous source of impulsions, but as a flaw in a narcissistically perceived reality. The enemy is experienced as a recalcitrant part of an expanded self over which the narcissistically vulnerable person had expected to exercise full control. The mere fact, in other words, that the other person is independent or different is experienced as offensive by those with intense narcissistic needs.

Thus, not being in full control over self and over a narcissistically experienced world gives the afflicted individual an experience of utter powerlessness. Such powerlessness and the sense of helplessness via-a-vis the world are unbearably traumatic experiences that must be ended by any means whatsoever. The offending other must be wiped out.

…The need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means, and a deeply anchored, unrelenting compulsion in the pursuit of all these aims, which gives no rest to those who have suffered a narcissistic injury -these are the characteristic features of narcissistic rage in all its forms and which set it apart from other kinds of aggression.

[….]

Every individual self needs to possess and exercise a certain amount of power to guarantee the maintenance of its cohesion and boundaries, even its continuation as a separate and distinct self. The loss of power which usually is associated with being subjected to some sort of feeling helpless is for most human beings an unbearable experience. It evokes an overwhelming desire to wipe out the offending source of the threatened helplessness. This narcissistic rage is an unlimited deadly destructive rage that is not appeased even by the defeat and disappearance of the evoking threat. In contrast to angry hostility caused by frustration of a self’s ordinary aims, a hostility that diminishes as the frustration diminishes and as the desired aims finally are achieved, narcissistic rage goes on and on and on with hardly a let up in its destructiveness even when no further threat to the self remains.

The political arena allows many individuals to act out narcissistic rage as members of a group. We can understand this better when we remember that individuals who experience themselves as powerless often identify with groups by joining them. Groups that appear to have some power become seductively attractive to the narcissistic individual who is trying to escape the feeling of powerlessness. They experience the group power as their own power and any threat to the group power is experienced as an unbearable threat to their own self which then evokes unlimited rage in defense of self. Common are the hatreds that groups carry for other groups whom, rightly or wrongly, they perceive as threats to their very existence. They kill and destroy without mercy while at the same time enjoying a feeling of righteous triumph over a threatening enemy….

[….]

What can be done? Our psychological reasoning would lead us to believe that in order to reduce the rage one must try to reduce the experience of helplessness and substitute gradually an experience of having some power. The first step would seem to be an effort to really listen to each other and try to understand the other’s experience. To really feel one is being seen, being listened to most often leads to feeling understood. The experience of being understood is a self-empowering experience. We know that from working with individuals who, when they feel understood in treatment, they immediately grow stronger.

© 2001 Ernest S. Wolf and 3b.
http://www.selfpsychology.com/papers/wolf_2001b_group_helplessness_and_rage.htm.

Now I can hear you from here saying "Dag, you rotten bastard, why didn't you cut out the last bit to keep this poor doctor from looking like that on your blog post?" I feel your pain.

There is too much bullshit raked around by pseudo-sophisticates who don't have any sense of anything but the imitation of conformity they feel they must practice to have a normal life in a hectic world of Modernity. OK, but there are some defining acts in a person's life that can't be walked away from without regard. You, bud, are stuck with it if what you do leads to others being murdered. Allowing this Muslim tantrum to continue and spread and deepen is to cause the murder of those who will not, perhaps at this time cannot, control themselves, and who must be constrained by force against their collective will. That's less than likely for most of us in person. But for any thinking caring and sharing person the least one can do is shout and demand a halt to this infantile rage. Instead we get sympathy-sisters weeping crocodile tears for every dead jihadi who blows up a school full of children or a bus or a diner or you insert it here. If you aren't part of the solution, you are the problem.

Yes, you must conform to the norms of our lives and societies; and part of that is standing up against idiots and cynics and killers. Not many of you will have the courage to do so, but those few among our multitude of readers who do are welcome to join us in our very pubic protests against the expressed infantile rage and the coterminous dhimmitude of our cowed intelligentsia. Doctors blowing themselves up in aeroports. Give me a break. Or I'll kill ten innocent bystanders to teach you a lesson.

Can the West continue without Christianity?

My latest at Flares

But he must have been crazy!

A man physically hinders himself in a ridiculous costume, walks into a bank with no weapon and demands money. The bank gives him some. Why? Maybe because the rule book just says give bank robbers some money, don't risk lives; and no one who writes rule books is creative enough to imagine this situation. We often talk about modern bureaucratic society creating a world of mental infants and cowards who bend to any and every threat from bad guys. Is this yet more proof or am I just imagining things?

(WBZ) MANCHESTER, NH Police are looking for a man who attempted to disguise himself as a tree and rob a bank in Manchester, New Hampshire Saturday morning.

Police say the suspect used duct tape to attach tree branches onto his body as a form of camouflage. He then walked into the Citizens Bank on Elm Street and demanded money.

No one was hurt in the robbery and no weapons were used, according to police. The bank was closed and police cruisers blocked off the entrances to the bank as officials investigated the incident.

Aside from sporting tree branches, the suspect was also wearing a bluish-colored T-shirt, blue jeans and had thick glasses. He was about 5' 8" tall with a thin build and dark hair.

The tree robber was able to escape with an undisclosed amount of cash.

link...

Jihad Bobby, just a guy.

My doctor scares me because he's a Muslim. Maybe I'm wrong to feel that he's a potential killer. But I found out for sure, to the point I have good cause to inform the police. I call, I tell, I tell a Muslim police officer. I tell him my Mulsim doctor is a killer, a jihadi terrorist. I go home to wait for some response, to see my doctor taken down by the ERT, hauled away in a body bag, captured, anything.

I get a knock at the door, and there I find eight policemen who want to take me and my mates downtown for further questioning....[Of course, only four shown above.]

STEPHEN WRIGHT, Eight Al Qaeda fanatics working for the police (but they don't dare sack them). London: 7th July 2007

Up to eight police officers and civilian staff are suspected of links to extremist groups including Al Qaeda. Some are even believed to have attended terror training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Their names feature on a secret list of alleged radicals said to be working in the Metropolitan and other forces.

The dossier was drawn up with the help of MI5 that fears that individuals linked to Islamic extremism are taking advantage of police attempts to increase the proportion of ethnic staff. Astonishingly, many of the alleged jihadists have not been sacked because - it is claimed - police do not have the "legal power" to dismiss them. We can also reveal that one suspected jihadist officer working in the South East has been allowed to keep his job despite being caught circulating Internet images of beheadings and roadside bombings in Iraq. He is said to have argued that he was trying to "enhance" debate about the war. Classified intelligence reports raising concerns about police staff's background cannot be used to justify their dismissal, sources said.

Instead, the staff who are under suspicion are unofficially barred from working in sensitive posts and are closely monitored. Political correctness is blamed for the decision not to sack them. It is widely feared that "long-term" Al Qaeda sleepers are trying to infiltrate other public sector organisations in the UK. In November last year, it was revealed that a leading member of an extremist Islamic group was working as a senior official at the Home Office.

[....]

Suspicions are growing that the gang behind the failed London bomb attacks could have received inside information about rescue procedures in the aftermath of an atrocity in the capital. The Daily Mail can reveal that the second device parked near Haymarket was left at a designated "evacuation assembly point" where civilians and the emergency services would have gathered had the first bomb gone off. Investigators are trying to establish whether the bombers knew the significance of the location.

Sources said it is unlikely that the Met is the only force which may have been infiltrated by Al Qaeda sympathisers.

[I] is understood that a policeman was removed from his post after concerns about his conduct in the aftermath of a major anti-terrorist operation in the past two years. For legal reasons, the Mail cannot reveal any more about the case.

[....]

The disclosure will raise concerns about the system for vetting new recruits, each of whom is the subject of counter-terrorism checks to ensure they are suitable to join the police. Scotland Yard's vetting unit is regarded as one of the best in the country. But sources said it is often impossible to carry out satisfactory checks on recruits who were raised overseas or who have spent considerable periods out of Britain before applying to join the Met. In such cases, the Met has to rely on overseas agencies to carry out intelligence checks on their behalf. Privately, officials doubt whether certain countries in Africa, Middle East or the Indian sub-continent are able to carry out meaningful vetting.

As a result of the Stephen Lawrence public inquiry report, which accused the Met of being "institutionally racist", Scotland Yard has in recent years employed thousands of officers and civilian staff from the ethnic minorities in an attempt to reach recruitment targets.

[Full story here. ]

I go to my accountant to have him confer with my lawyer over a major business deal involving a lot of money, serious money, and a deal involving some specialized equipment for the defense industry. Both men are Muslims....

But no, I'm just an I'm just an ordinary guy who gets a pay cheque every two weeks, and I put it in the bank, a bank owned by Muslims from the Gulf of Arabia, as it turns out....

No, I don't even do that, to tell the truth. I duck into a corner store for a loaf of bread and a quart of milk, a corner store owned by Muslims....
****

MIM: The Association of Muslim Police in the UK encourages Muslim officers to do Jihad through conversion and try to recruit non Muslims to Islam and more co-religionists to the police -- in order to continue their Islamist propagation on the taxpayer's dime. The AMP openly proclaims that their mission is to "circulate books and pamphlets about Islam to members of the MPS who genuinely want to improve their knowledge and awareness of Islam and Muslims".

... Since 2002 the Metropolitan Police Service has amended its dress code to allow female Muslim officers to wear the hijab. The Head of the Met's Human Resources, Bernard Hogan-Howe, has said: "It is only right that the Met. ensures that its uniform is appropriate for all its staff."

... Tarique Ghaffur highest ranking UK police chief blamed "Islamophobia" for terrorism a month after the London bombings.

... Ghaffur constantly undermines the police counter terrorism efforts by joining forces with his co-religionists complaining that his colleagues and the government's efforts to thwart attacks are discriminatory, and victimise Muslims. More at MEMRI...
****

But that last piece was from Oct. 2006.

Does anyone recall what happened two years ago today in London? should I go to the Muslim-owned kiosk to buy a paper to find out if there's a commemorative story? Go by Muslim-owned taxi? Or walk, whistling as I pass the mosque?

Doctor in the House (of War.)

LONDON, July 3 — All eight people arrested in the aftermath of two bungled car bombings here last week are from the medical profession, a British police official said Tuesday, rattling a national heath service that has long relied on foreign doctors to fill its understaffed hospitals.

The seven men are physicians, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, while the lone woman, the wife of one, is a laboratory technician. The police are now working to unravel links and prior contacts within this far-flung expatriate medical circle.

[....]

7 Doctors Tied to British Plots
New York Times, United States - 4 Jul 2007
****

You go to your doctor, and he says: "Open you mouth, feet in the stirrups, bend over, this won't hurt a bit....."

He's a blond from somewhere, he never does say where and you're too polite to press, maybe from, you would guess, Jugoslavia, maybe Turkia, it's hard to say, and when he's done with you and calling on another you leave saying, "Thank you, Dr. Uthman."

Six months later you go to the hospital with the wife and kids all sick to find you and a roomful of others all have a raging case of incurable t.b. and you all have the same doctor. And then others enter, strangers to you, people who have come in contact with people you've come in contact with.

Bad infidel.

But the doctor seems so nice.... He's the doctor. He's part of the war on terror. I salute your bravery and ask if there's a doctor in the house, a doctor I can trust not to kill me in the name of Allah.

Last evening during the course of our meeting we discussed briefly the murder after 9/11 of a Sikh on a bicycle, the killer thinking he'd done some great thing to a Muslim, being too ignorant or stupid or bigoted to know that Sikhs are at risk from jihad-determined Muslims just like the rest of us.

Robert Spence writes at Jihad Watch this day: "For pete's sake. If I were a Hindu doctor in Britain or Australia, I'd be writing to the Times about this. The problem is not Indian doctors, it's Muslim doctors, and everyone knows it. Evidently the politically correct imperative gives one a license to slur innocent groups -- anything to protect the Protected Victims Du Jour, the Muslims."

Here's a few lines of what Spence quotes from Times Online

"Police today raided two hospitals in Western Australia in connection with the failed terrorist plot in Britain.

Detectives have seized computer files and questioned five doctors of Indian background. Four doctors have been released."

****

If you don't feel that you understand this problem well enough to make a clear decision about Islam or Muslim doctors, or if you have much knowledge about Islam and care to share yours with us, feel free to sit in and let us know or not know or what have you. Meanwhile, skip the two Valiums and call me in the morning.

Come to the Covenant Zone and grow a little

On a day when we mourn more fallen Canadian soldiers, those brave souls struggling against great forces to make this a freer world, we need to rededicate ourselves to this shared cause.

Let us remind that the Covenant Zone bloggers and friends meet every Thursday, 7-9 pm, in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library (in front of Blenz Coffee - look for the blue scarves). All those interested in renewing a national culture founded on citizen self-rule through a discipline conducive to freedom, and not through submission to any form of totalitarian political religion or phony expertise, are welcome and encouraged to join us. This week I will just give you a few links to help do that job of encouraging.

Concluding a speech to a European audience, Gil Bailie notes (as he might well if he were in Canada):

The history of this century and beyond will be very largely determined by whether the West finds a way to reclaim and reaffirm its spiritual inheritance and thereby reenergize a culture that fosters the genuine flourishing of its people and to which others – whatever their race, creed, ethnicity, or background – will want to transfer their national allegiance, culturally assimilate, and contribute their part.

On Canada Day, David Warren gave a useful update of the "two nations" interpretation of Canadian history:

Canada today is “deux nations.” There are the people who speak and think in French; and the people who speak and think in English. Together they make up one nation, with a continuous history, of more than five centuries. And then there are the people who speak, effectively, no language; who are deracinated, who have no history. That is the other nation. There is very little communication between these two nations -- the “old” Canada, and the “new” Canada -- because little communication is possible between two such groups. The one is aging and shrinking, the other expanding while growing ever younger. (Yet all trends are reversible.)

Demographically, but also spiritually. Those who have no language, no culture, no religion, no sense of past, and therefore of destiny, remain ever young. Outwardly they may become old and wrinkly, but inwardly they retain the mind of the pre-school child, unformed and cloudless. Yet they fulfil the requirements for citizenship set out in John Lennon’s famous hymn to emptiness, “Imagine”:

“Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people, living for today. Imagine there's no countries: it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for; and no religion, too. Imagine all the people, living life in peace.”

This is the postmodern dream, of perfect vacuity -- of the serenity we imagine will sweep over us like sleep. All we need do is abandon everything of value in our heritage, everything for which so many of our ancestors actually fought and died. In this great zero, everyone will be equal, and no person will be better than another. The heroine and the harlot will be one and the same, great saints and great monsters indistinguishable. “Judgementalism” -- the aversion that one individual has behaved better than another -- is, among the vacuous today, the only crime remaining to be punished. And likewise, under the doctrine of “multiculturalism,” there is nothing to choose between one culture and another. They are all just fine, and so far as any particularity can still be distinguished, “everything is beautiful in its own way.”

But if you can't judge and discriminate, e.g. identify how Islam is different from all other "religions", you can never hope to grow up and truly become humble in service to a decent human cause or nation. The contemporary left, in denying our need to validate meaningful differences, around which a free human exchange of differences may be organized, makes all important human differences either into a scandal for some abstract notion of "equality", or occasion for a phony celebration. In either case, it becomes the responsibility of some bureaucrat to smooth over the differences, with whatever force necessary. The left today intends to impose a cult of victims and "equality" that will require a managerial priesthood constantly to determine who is a victim of a lack of proper equality of outcome, to seek redress (since any freedom generally permitted people will not lead to equal outcomes, at any one point in time), and hence to restrict the freedom that inevitably leads people to create, affirm, and exchange, differences.

It is in the affirmation of what makes us a new race of free Canadians - entirely unlike, say, those who take advantage of a chance to come to the West to become well-paid doctors, only to then attempt to kill as many Westerners as they can - that we discover the need to renew and recreate the old and new covenants of the West that can make this nation a true unity in diversity. It is time to decide whether you are on the side of freedom or of the totalitarian management of "diversity".

Only people with constitutional or covenantal guarantees that they, as free persons, can take the lead in negotiating and trading their differences, and not have to rely on expert bureaucrats (or thugs with religious books) to do more than what is the expert's proper job - to help us recognize and institutionalize, not initiate or control, the fruits of a free national discourse - can be considered mature, fully-realized, human beings. Those who best understand our common human origin are today rightly arguing that we are meant by the original events of human creation (or by our Creator, if you prefer) to negotiate and perform our history in freedom, to continually seek for the truth.

And if we don't encourage each other to become fully human, each in our own way, by meeting and talking on a regular basis to this end, how are we going to be able to negotiate with the aliens if they return? Must we again behave like children who only know how to dominate or be dominated? Or can we show the aliens we are up to the possibilities of a truly free political and economic exchange? Or, as the liberal mainstream would today seemingly have it, must we convince the humanoid aliens that we are all just the same, or that our differences are all equal in importance, which is to say nothing that distinguishes us from them is really important, and certainly not to be discussed in public? Just a friendly thought -:)

Left Jihadi Rats Jumping Ship.

Now we know. When we see the hordes of former Leftists join the jihad it will be perfectly clear to all of us why:

"Ghazi said his movement didn't want to topple Musharraf because that wouldn't cure the nation's problems. ``Another Musharraf will rise,'' he said. ``We have a better option in the shape of the Islamic welfare system. The Islamic system is so complete it gives justice to everyone.''

The context, because in a week I'll forget the details of this too: In Pakistan a few thousand Muslim supporters of the Taliban have held a mosque in the center of Kharachi against the government, soldiers have been killed in the taking of it, and all of this because the jihadis kidnapped and killed in the city for the sake of imposing sharia on the nation.

Sharia, the newest and greatest collectivist scam since communism. "[T]he Islamic welfare system." "[S]o complete it gives justice to everyone.''


Watch the Leftist rats scurry from the sunk ship of Communism to the rotten hulk of Islam. And then on to the next till they finally go down forever, we can only hope, he prayed.

Click on the graphic for larger view.

The Puzzling Failure of Dag.

I would sneak past the dog on the chain and hope his choking didn't wake my mother as I got into the trailerhouse where we lived, but sometimes even if the dog's growling and gurgling didn't wake her up she'd be laying there on the sofa watching soap operas, her hair in curlers, and she'd be popping bon-bons while she watched General Hospital on the flickering black and white t.v. with the coat hanger antenna pulling in the trials and tribulations of the better-off. "Hey you, " she'd yell if she spotted me, "what're you doing in here? Why ain't you at school studying to be a doctor like these here folks on the t.v.?"

I cringe even now when I think of the wasted life I've lived, me not pursuing a career as a doctor.

Ma would yell out, "Lookee there, you ain't done no dishes for a week. Lookee there!" I knew when she said it that if I'd been smarter or better looking I could be a doctor and I'd never have to look at dishes in the sink again. I could eat in restaurants every meal and have Puerto Ricans wash up after me. I'd tell ma I was working hard at my rithmatic sos I could be a doctor and then she'd relax and go back to watching the future she had planned for me. Her son, the doctor, screwing all the low-life nurses and gittin into trouble with married ladies and such. She had my interests at heart, I'm sure. "An roll some o' them tires outta the yard inta the ditch. Place looks like a gawd dam junk yard!"

I never did make it into medical school. I went to university, even for a short time in Jordan where I found I just don't have the mind for wiring and propane tanks and that kind of mechanical stuff. So, yes, I failed my audition in Hollywood. I was good enough at chasing girls, and I looked just right in a lab coat; but it was the driving skills that had me. I could never find the airport. I kept crashing the Mercedes into the first lamppost I came to, not being able to get anywhere near a night club. But the worst of it was, and this is the reason I failed not just ma and myself but the whole point of living, I could never get that Koranic stuff.

Ma died of a broken heart cause I didn't become a doctor. Every year I go out to Potter's Field and pour a couple bottles of Cream Soda on her spot, and I tell her how sorry I am I didn't get the job on the soap opera. She's so angry even all the grass is dead around her spot. I coulda faked all that other stuff, but it was that Koran stuff that sunk me. I just never did get it. It puzzles me big time.

Physician, anneal thyself.

"Do no harm." BUT. Do no harm to Muslims. The kufar don't matter. In fact, kill the unbelievers wherever you find them. It is a command from Allah, Koran 9:5, the Sword Verse. Not all Muslims take it literally, do they? Not all Muslim doctors take it literally do they? Not all Muslim doctors in Vancouver, Canada take it literally do they?

Who knows?

Eight suspects 'have links to NHS'

Press Association
Wednesday July 4, 2007 4:53 AM

All eight people arrested in connection with car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow have links to the NHS.

Seven are believed to be doctors or trainee doctors while the one woman under arrest is a trained laboratory researcher. [More at:] http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-6756343,00.html.


What we don't read in the press is that, as we know, all of the folks arrested and those others being sought in connection with these latest attempts at indiscriminate mass murder are Muslims who read the Koran and know more about it than most of us do. If they follow the religion they know, why do we find our own non-Muslim experts telling us the Muslims don't know their own religion? This last lot of jihadis, much like many others in the jihad business, are not stupid or starving or desperate in any normal sense of our experience. So why not give these people credit for the brain power they obviously have, and give them credit too for knowing their own religion well enough to practice it properly. If we know Islam better than the average Muslim medical doctor, why friend, should we think he knows medicine better than we do? If you know more medicine than the doctor, heal thyself. If you know Islam better than a Muslim doctor, why not become an imam? But if all this is seeming to make sense and you find you're faced with a Muslim doctor who has your trust in his knowledge of specialized areas, then what are you going to do if you find yourself alone with him getting advice about your own life, Mr. Finkleschwartz, Mrs. Trollope, Miss pregnant teen-age girl, tribal tattoo dude?

I haven't looked in the phone book under physicians to find out how many doctors in this city are named Abu, Ali, Mohammed, Omar, Uthman, and so on. If I found myself in need of a doctor I'd think twice about anyone with a name like that. Why? Because I give them credit for knowing their own religion, and it demands they call us to Islam, demand that we convert, pay jizya, or die. I don't want a doctor with an approach to medicine that includes those prescriptions. I'd look in the phone book to see who to avoid in case of an emergency.

Is it only me?

Or has everyone else who has been reading many news stories on the British, er Muslim, doctors terrorist plot, not been told this salient point for which I had to turn to The London car-bomb plot was designed to kill women. - By Christopher Hitchens :

...Only at the tail end of the coverage was it admitted that a car bomb might have been parked outside a club in Piccadilly because it was "ladies night" and that this explosion might have been designed to lure people into to the street, the better to be burned and shredded by the succeeding explosion from the second car-borne cargo of gasoline and nails. Since we have known since 2004 that a near-identical attack on a club called the Ministry of Sound was proposed in just these terms, on the grounds that dead "slags" or "sluts" would be regretted by nobody, a certain amount of trouble might have been saved by assuming the obvious. The murderers did not just want body parts in general but female body parts in particular.

I suppose that some people might want to shy away from this conclusion for whatever reason, but they cannot have been among the viewers of British Channel 4's recent Undercover Mosque, or among those who watched Sunday's report from Christiane Amanpour on CNN's Special Investigations Unit. On these shows, the British Muslim fanatics came right out with their program. Straight into the camera, leading figures like Anjem Choudary spoke of their love for Osama Bin Laden and their explicit rejection of any definition of Islam as a religion of peace. On tape or in person, mullahs in prominent British mosques called for the killing of Indians and Jews.

Liberal reluctance to confront this sheer horror is the result, I think, of a deep reticence about some furtive concept of "race." It is subconsciously assumed that a critique of political Islam is an attack on people with brown skins. One notes in passing that any such concession implicitly denies or negates Islam's claim to be a universal religion. Indeed, some of its own exponents certainly do speak as if they think of it as a tribal property. And, at any rate, in practice, so it is. The fascistic subculture that has taken root in Britain and that lives by violence and hatred is composed of two main elements. One is a refugee phenomenon, made up of shady exiles from the Middle East and Asia who are exploiting London's traditional hospitality, and one is the projection of an immigrant group that has its origins in a particularly backward and reactionary part of Pakistan.

To the shame-faced white-liberal refusal to confront these facts, one might counterpose a few observations. The first is that we were warned for years of the danger, by Britons also of Asian descent such as Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, and Salman Rushdie. They knew what the village mullahs looked like and sounded like, and they said as much. Not long ago, I was introduced to Nadeem Aslam, whose book Maps for Lost Lovers is highly recommended.

He understands the awful price of arranged marriages, dowry, veiling, and the other means by which the feudal arrangements of rural Pakistan have been transplanted to parts of London and Yorkshire. "In some families in my street," he writes to me, "the grandparents, parents, and the children are all first cousins—it's been going on for generations and so the effects of the inbreeding are quite pronounced by now." By his estimate and others, a minority of no more than 11 percent is responsible for more than 70 percent of the birth defects in Yorkshire. When a leading socialist member of Parliament, Ann Cryer, drew attention to this appalling state of affairs in her own constituency, she was promptly accused of—well, you can guess what she was accused of. The dumb word Islamophobia, uncritically employed by Christiane Amanpour in her otherwise powerful documentary, was the least of it. Meanwhile, an extreme self-destructive clannishness, which is itself "phobic" in respect to all outsiders, becomes the constituency for the preachings of a cult of death. I mention this because, if there is an "ethnic" dimension to the Islamist question, then in this case at least it is the responsibility of the Islamists themselves.

The most noticeable thing about all theocracies is their sexual repression and their directly related determination to exert absolute control over women. In Britain, in the 21st century, there are now honor killings, forced marriages, clerically mandated wife-beatings, incest in all but name, and the adoption of apparel for females that one cannot be sure is chosen by them but which is claimed as an issue of (of all things) free expression. This would be bad enough on its own and if it were confined to the Muslim "community" alone. But, of course, such a toxin cannot be confined, and the votaries of theocracy now claim the God-given right to slaughter females at random for nothing more than their perceived immodesty. The least we can do, confronted by such radical evil, is to look it in the eye (something it strives to avoid) and call it by its right name.

I think what Hitchens is trying to say, though even he will not name it, is that this terrorism is part of not just a religious or ideological war, but also a racial war, a war to control the Other's women, which is no doubt what many Muslims think we are trying to do when we criticize things like full hijab. Somewhere, there, is another insight into what motivated these doctors in their various, body management and bombing for Allah, careers. The modern liberal West denies the significance of both race and religion as fundamental motivators of human behaviour, especially of trained medical men; it seems certain Muslims are trying to tell us otherwise.

Race consciousness is a product of sexual, or marriage partner, selection and exchange, and of all the cultural and genetic traits that go with it; and this is not (not least among those who deny it) a random or ethically neutral business. Islamic apologists like to tell us that within Islam all races are equal, united in the Umma. If that's so, why the cousin marriages? How many Pakistanis in Britain have Arab wives, or vice versa? I imagine more of each have white wives. As we see everyday in the tribal killings of Iraq, the battle for both sectarian and racial leadership of the Umma remains open in the new global order.

Notes from Najistan.

At Infidel Bloggers Alliance, a blog we regulars here also contribute to on an irregular basis, Najistani left the following comment regarding the state of the Union Jacks and Jills:

Najistani said...

May I explain to our American and Australian friends what is happening in Britain.

We are now sliding from a state of intermittent acts of terrorism into one of continuous low-level civil war.

As happened in Northern Ireland, religious communities are polarising and moderates are being silenced.

In the face of this increasing division between Muslim and Kaffir, the ruling NuLabor/SNP elite is attempting to maintain its facade of multicultural bliss by ever more drastic censorship and repressive legislation.

The Glasgow attack is a particular wake up call for the Scots. In the past Scotland has been immune from terrorist attacks because IRA terrorists regarded the Scots as fellow Celts, subjugated by the same Sassanach jackboot.

As Scotland has regained its independence, the Marxist Scottish Nationalist Party has been keen to encourage immigration by non-English ethnic groups (Definition of a Scotsman - Not an Englishman) in the same way that Quebecois have encouraged the immigration of francophone Muslims from Algeria (Definition of a Quebecois - not a Canadian).

Both nations are now reaping the whirlwind, with Glasgow having a particularly severe infestation of vicious and aggressive Muslims who torture and mutilate Kaffir children (Google for 'Kris Donald castrated').

To the Muslim there is no distinction between England and Scotland - they are both Dar al-Harb.


NuLabor came to power ten years ago filled with Marxist idealism. They re-labelled stuffy old Britain as 'Kool Britannia' and opened the gates to all who wanted to enter this multi-culti socialist paradise.

In an absolutely breathtaking combination of ignorance and arrogance they allowed three million Muslims to enter the country in the belief that they would buy into Kool Britania and become loyal socialist voters. Of course many of these Muslims came from jihad zones such as Kashmir, where the divisions between Muslim and Kaffir, Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, are basic realities.

Consequently, Muslims have not become the model socialist citizens that the Marxists expected, and NuLabor has absolutely no idea how to deal with them.

The BNP do understand the Muslim Problem but are unlikely to come to power sufficiently quickly to take the necessary actions to prevent the bloodbath predicted by Enoch Powell when the Muslim infestation first began.


History is littered with great civilisations destroyed by Islam. British and European civilisations are beyond saving. Americans and Australians need to pay close attention to what is happening in Britain because without drastic action the same slow decline into civil war and Balkanisation will happen in your countries.

Sunday, July 01, 2007 11:02:00 PM

Valour steeped in faith: Canada Day

A quick post to wish all of our Canadian readers, and particularly my two fellow bloggers, a belated Canada Day.

We sang both the english and the french version of our national anthem back to back at Mass on Sunday. It had been quite a long, long time since I had occasion to measure one against the other. They are not the same song, in that the french version is its own version, and not a direct translation of the english lyrics.
Despite a combination of innate shyness and no discernable singing skill whatsoever, I found myself in loud voice by the time we got through the french version of our national anthem... those lyrics really got to me, this time.

They reflect the Canada I hold in my mind as I choose the way I live my life here; indeed the very act of living here in Canada being a choice in itself. So many from my generation have been offered a chance to leave, to work and raise a family elsewhere (typically either the US or Europe), and took it, usually in order to make more money. I myself have been tempted with many opportunities to leave, and while I've come close to moving away on several occasions, I've nevertheless stayed Home.

It’s been a choice I’ve wrestled with for years, a crossroads my wife and I discuss annually each Christmas, as we take stock of the year gone by, and look to the year ahead. Despite clear benefits to living and working elsewhere, we’ve decided to stay in Canada. Maybe the reasons for that decision sound silly on any other day but Canada Day: I believe my country needs me here, to help in my own small way, by my own small act, to keep faith in my nation's future, as one keeps faith in the covenant one forms with one's spouse, with one's family... Such commitments are certainly challenging, for nations, like the people who live in them, are not perfect, and are prone to all the regrettable behaviors, errors of judgment and disagreements over direction that, in their own way, also shatter friendships, marriages, and families.

Unlike so many people from so many other countries across our planet, we Canadians are free to leave our Home. We are free to find new financial opportunities wherever we may make them, we are free to make a new family wherever we may find them. Yet some of us choose to stay Home.

Like the love of any deep romance, we are in love with our nation; not so much smitten by a snapshot of the nation as it exists, here and now today, but by a dream of the nation that could be. Just as with any abiding love, it is not mere physical attraction to a present shape, but a perception of the potential inside that outer shell, a glimpse into the unseen soul within, and the long shadow it casts far off into the distance. I suspect it's a similar vision of Canadian potential that brought my grandmother's mother, my mother's father, and my own father, to these timbered shores, in their time, and kept them here, in their new Home, despite their similar opportunities, and many temptations, to move on.

We Canadians may consider ourselves free to do as we wish, yet tend to use such "freedom" as the excuse for doing little, mostly cutting ourselves adrift from each other, forsaking our nation’s potential strength; surely our national anthems, in either language, can teach us that the most nourishing freedom comes from accepting responsibilities, from holding hands rather than waving ours about, unfettered; some commitments can offer us a bottomless source of resilience, granting us leverage from which to derive great strengths, even if it may seem a challenging effort, sometimes, for such benefits to be recognized. It's too easy to feel that the hand holding ours may be a constraint, keeping us from adding to our life; much harder to summon the humility in seeing its potential as a support, as a helping hand up, rather than a weight holding us down.

Too many people excuse themselves from the effort required to see the unseen, to embrace things grander than themselves, for fear of the uncertainty such actions must bring, and resentment of the sacrifices such gestures must demand.

My generation needs the discipline to embrace Canada's potential future, by first humbling itself to fully appreciate its past, a past filled with countless courageous acts of faith, if we are to remain a northern nation True, Strong and Free.

English version of the National Anthem:

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.

With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!

From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

(translated) French Version of the National Anthem:

O Canada!
Land of our forefathers
Thy brow is wreathed with a glorious garland of flowers.
As in thy arm ready to wield the sword,
So also is it ready to carry the cross.
Thy history is an epic of the most brilliant exploits.

Thy valour steeped in faith
Will protect our homes and our rights
Will protect our homes and our rights.