SPEAKING FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS ?

I saw in my local newspaper, The Fresno Bee, an article from the NY Times this week, announcing that "Liberal Groups Planning Rally on National Mall" this Saturday.

Hoping to overshadow last month’s large rally led by Glenn Beck that drew many Tea Party advocates and other conservatives, a coalition of liberal groups plan to descend on Washington on Saturday to make the case that they, and not the ascendant right, speak for America’s embattled middle class.

How nice.

The article mentions several groups that are planning the march, including:

...the N.A.A.C.P., the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the National Council of La Raza and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force — are sponsoring a march on Saturday in the hope of transforming the national conversation so it focuses less on the Tea Party. The groups sponsoring the rally, which is called “One Nation Working Together,” say they hope to supplant what they say is the Tea Party’s divisiveness with a message of unity to promote jobs, justice and education.

Here are the groups it surprisingly doesn't mention in the article who are involved in the planning and who presumably "speak for America's embattled middle class":

–Chicago Democratic Socialists of America

–Code Pink

–Committee of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism

–Communist Party USA

–Democratic Socialists of America

–International Socialist Organization

As Daniel Foster sarcastically writes, "A veritable tapestry of America’s embattled middle class."

Yeah, right.

Let's talk about the concept of a 'middle class' for a moment and what it is all about so you can see how the above groups not only do not represent 'middle class' values in this country, but actually reflect the very opposite.

Democracies are not developed or sustained by the political extremes- they are the trust and legacy of a vibrant, functioning middle class. In fact, a successful middle class demands that government answer to them, and not the other way around.

Marx always expected that the middle class--which he described as composed of the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant etc--would own some property, but not sufficient to have all work done by employees or workers. Those in the middle class must also work in order to survive and are thus simultaneously members of Marx's proletariat as well as his bourgeoisie. He expected that the middle class would disappear as capitalism developed, since the only sustainable positions were the ones of his dialectic.

It turns out this is not the case.

Whenever the workers are given political and economic liberty and allowed to pursue their own happiness (and not the state's), the middle class has continued to expand. In fact, the values of this particular economic group have come to anchor society in the United States. Far from wanting to ignite a worker's revolution as Marx predicted, they enjoy the creature comforts of the capitalist system and feel themselves empowered by it. Worse (from the communist/socialist's perspective anyway), the typical person in the middle class believes that he or she can better themselves by using the many opportunities offered by a liberal, capitalistic democracy.

Even in Communist China, capitalistic pursuits and entrepreneurship have become the true "opiates" of the masses--in the sense that to the degree people are free to pursue their own happiness and work for their own interests--i.e., where they have economic freedom, even if they don't have political freedom-- they are relatively content, and are unlikely to fulfill the ardent communist/socialist's revolutionary fantasies.

The most unsuccessful societies on earth are those with no middle class. observe the Palestinians, or many Middle Eastern countries, for example; where there exists only an elite, plundering class who are the beneficiaries of the oil wealth the land is blessed with; and a lower class, condemned by the elites to poverty, ignorance and oppression.

By way of contrast, in the most successful societies there is a large middle class, and anyone has the potential to succeed if they have a good idea, commitment to work and plenty of drive. America, Canada, the UK, Australia and Israel are all examples of societies that while very different, are very successful.

As the barrier to entry into the middle class becomes more onerous and difficult, requiring expensive and hard to obtain permits and licenses; societies are less successful and become progressively more likely to fail.

When there are few barriers to entering and operating within a free market, then the middle class can thrive; and the more successful both the entrepreneurs and the community becomes, the greater the stake the people have in maintaining peace and prosperity.

Consider how remarkable it is that leftist groups such as those listed above, who intend to participate in Saturday's rally are completely oblivious to the fact that the Marxist proletariat they have worshipped and depended upon for their revolution have finally arisen; but sadly, not in support of their ideas.

Quite the opposite. Marx thought that capitalism would go away and the middle class would disappear. But it hasn't; and it keeps coming back stronger than ever.

Today, in fact, we are treated to the spectacle of the proletariat rising up, not in rebellion against the oppressive forces of capitalism; but agains the oppressive influences of communism and socialism and big, centralized government.

Indeed, the world still reels from the misery and hardship that is rampant where Marxist, socialist and communist theory have "triumphed". In those sad places wealth all but disappeared; initiative went in decline; and the human misery index climbed to new heights. Instead of a healthy middle class; those societies that embraced Marx's ideas developed only powerful elites and poverty-stricken masses. This is the legacy of Marx's "social justice".

Instead of creating a utopia for the proletariat, Marx and his theories only generated the conditions for societal suicide.

The clever capitalist system actually managed to co-opt the "oppressed" workers, and helped them enter the dreaded "middle class"! That is why Obama and other elites like John Kerry rail against the very people who they claim they represent. Kerry, in fact, blames "uninformed voters" for the current woes being suffered by the Democrats. Both Obama and Kerry and others of their persuasion should be thanking God for all the uninformed voters who stupidly voted for the likes of them. Because as such voters become more and more informed, these same voters will come to the realization that their 'oppressors' are the people who are trying to take their freedom away, all the while claiming to be representing them.

Obama and Kerry have forgotten (if they ever knew to begin with) that the values and ideals of this particular economic group have come to anchor society in the United States.They may be thankful for their 'guns and religion', but they also have come to appreciate all the other creature comforts the American way of life provides for them. Amazingly, most even appreciate their flawed and imperfect health care system for the most part; certainly, they never wanted it to be overhauled by some monstronsity of a bill in Congress whose "cure" may be much worse than the actual disease (which unfortunately won't be known until someone is able to read the whole thing all the way through).

But, the worse reality--at least from the postmodern progressives' perspective--i.e., those people who feel they know best what is best for you and me, and who believe you cannot be trusted to make the proper decisions in pursuing your own happiness--is that the typical person in the middle class has the notion that he or she can better themselves by using the many opportunities offered by a liberal, capitalistic democracy! How radical is that??

And the more frantically and desperately the political left clenches its fists and tries to force their big government agenda on an unwilling populace, the more people will slip through their greedy and controlling little Marxist fingers--and go drink some tea.

How ironic that the worker's in Obama's paradise have finally begun to realize who the real oppressers are....

Speaking for the middle class? I don't think so.

THE PALESTINIAN GAMBIT

Cliff May thinks that the Obama Administration is focusing on the wrong problem in insisting on proceeding with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; and that this focus will likely lead to more bloodshed:

At an off-the-record gathering of foreign-policy mandarins and opinion-mongers recently, the former head of an allied nation said he was advising President Obama to push as hard as possible for a speedy settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Most of those attending the conference nodded in agreement. I bit my tongue, waited for a break, and then buttonholed the statesman near the coffee and tea dispensers. Might I ask a question? He graciously said I might.

Sir, if you were Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, would you make peace with the Israelis? You understand that peace would be of enormous benefit to your people and to Israelis alike. On the other hand, you know that while you wield power in the West Bank, Hamas rules Gaza. And Hamas refuses — as a matter of both theology and policy — to accept the existence of a Middle Eastern nation led by non-Muslims.

What’s more, Hamas is financed and instructed by an Iranian regime that also wants the Jewish state wiped off the map. Tehran plans to soon have nuclear weapons to utilize in pursuit of that goal.

Don’t you think that if you were to sign a peace treaty with Israel, as Egyptian president Anwar Sadat did in 1979, you would end up as Sadat did in 1981 — assassinated by self-proclaimed jihadis?

May goes on to succinctly elaborate on a number of realities which are being ignored in the quest for the elusive peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, and says:

With this as context, is advising President Obama to push as hard as possible for a quick settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict the wisest course? Does it not seem likely that this effort will lead, paradoxically, to more bloodshed? He suggested that the problem is complex — too complex to sort out during a break in a conference. He then politely excused himself.

His perspective, however, remains conventional wisdom — all the more so since face-to-face Palestinian-Israeli negotiations were resumed early this month after a hiatus of a year and a half. What I fear he and others are failing to recognize is that Israel is at war with Palestinians, Arabs, and much of the “Muslim world” not because of what it does but because of what it is: the last, tiny patch of land between Morocco and Pakistan not under some form of Islamic rule.

It's like in a chess game, carefully watching the movement of the various pawns, and ignoring the Queen as she moves in to achieve checkmate. In this instance, the Palestinian pawns are meant to draw attention away from the real threat in the region; who, if not countered, will render the entire peace process moot.

This chess game between the Mullahs in Iran and the West has been playing out for some time now.

Michael Ledeen had some sobering reflections about that reality a while back and it is worth revisiting his concerns:

Iran has been at war with us all along, because that’s what the world’s leading terror state does. The scariest thing about this moment is that the Iranians have convinced themselves that they are winning, and we are powerless to reverse the tide. As I reported here several months ago, Khamenei told his top people late last year that the Americans and Israelis are both politically paralyzed. Neither can take decisive action against Iran, neither can sustain prolonged conflict and significant casualties. Meanwhile, the Supreme Leader said, the terrorists are all working for Iran, and we will expand the terror war.

Don’t think for a moment that they worry about victims in Gaza or Lebanon. They are delighted to see Israel fighting on two fronts, because they will use the pictures from the battlefield to consolidate their hold over the fascist forces in the region. After a few days of fighting, I would not be surprised to see some new kind of terrorist attack against Israel, or against an American facility in the region. An escalation to chemical weapons, for example, or even the fulfillment of the longstanding Iranian promise to launch something nuclear at Israel. They meant it when they said it, don’t you know?

The only way we are going to win this war is to bring down those regimes in Tehran and Damascus, and they are not going to fall as a result of fighting between their terrorist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon on the one hand, and Israel on the other. Only the United States can accomplish it.

Except that, under Obama, the United State can't accomplish it anymore. We've already given up many of our pieces (e.g., when Obama sacrificed Israel)

Under the suicidal political correctness enforced by the Obama Administration it is highly unlikely that we will be able to capitalize on any advantage over the Mullahs and the patient game of chess they have been playing with us over the years.

It should be crystal clear to anyone paying attention who the puppet-masters of terror have been all along. The problem is that not many have been paying attention. Certainly not many on the left side of the poltical isle.

The Mullahs have been planning for this endgame ever since Jimmy Carter failed to stand up to them when they brashly held Americans hostage without consequences during his Administration. In Obama, they know they have another Carter--a Carter with new and improved dhimmitude.

Back in Carter's time, Ahmadinejad was one of the ringleaders of the American hostage-taking. He clearly thinks he understands the cut of America's jib from that first experience with Carter's passivity and appeasement; and in the decades since his first terrorist action, he probably has probably noted that the physical and psychological impotence of the Carter days has slowly spread into the entire body politic of America, resulting in a complete moral paralysis.

In other words, Iran is fully confident that Obama--who is rightly considered Carter's heir-- will not dare stand against their plans for Middle Eastern Armageddon.

I hope Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs are wrong about this. The part of America that has lost the courage to stand for what is right; and who have been in psychological denial since 9/11 may be in power now, but there are forces rising in America that might just understand how close the game is to checkmate if we don't alter our strategy.

As far as Iran's nuclear intents regarding Israel, Ledeen has this to say: "They meant it when they said it, don't you know?"

That's what is truly remarkable about this situation. Iran repeatedly says over and over again what they intend to do. They signal their moves clearly, like some inept chess player--or like a Grand Master who is arrogantly over-confident amd can't conceive of losing to an inferior player.

Ledeen's piece ends with:

You cannot escape the mullahs. You must either defeat them or submit to their terrible vision. There is no other way.

This game will not end in a draw. The west is being backed into a corner and instead of regrouping and going on the attack; we are letting our opponent take our eyes off his aggressive endgame moves.

Cliff May's piece is called "Peace--But Not Now" and that should be our goal: to achieve peace in the region, we must ignore the Palestinian (and the Lebanese) gambits being played by Iran, and focus our attention on thwarting the more powerful pieces in the region.

GUTLESS PUSSIES

Mark Steyn writes that

Too many people in the free world have internalized Islam’s view of them. A couple of years ago, I visited Guantanamo and subsequently wrote that, if I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new copy of the Koran in each cell: To reassure incoming prisoners that the filthy infidels haven't touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Korans are hung from the walls in pristine, sterilized surgical masks. It's one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it's hard to see why it's in the interests of us infidels to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry. What does that degree of prostration before their prejudices tell them about us? It’s a problem that Muslims think we’re unclean. It’s a far worse problem that we go along with it.

Yes it is.

Steyn goes on to describe how many of us have become complicit in the destruction of our freedom:

But forget about notorious rightwing hatemongers like me. Look at how liberal progressives protect their own. Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? She's the dopey Seattle cartoonist who cooked up "Everybody Draws Mohammed" Day, and then, when she realized what she'd stumbled into, tried to back out of it. I regard Miss Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to Mark's Mailbox to object. I stand by what I wrote then, especially the bit about her crappy peace-sign T-shirt. Now The Seattle Weekly informs us:

You may have noticed that Molly Norris' comic is not in the paper this week. That's because there is no more Molly.

On the advice of the FBI, she's been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization's sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine's Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris' own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: "There is no more Molly"? That's all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:

Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?

Who knows? Given his highly selective enthusiasms, you can hardly blame a third of Americans for figuring their president must be Muslim. In a way, that's the least pathetic explanation: The alternative is that he's just a craven squish. Which is odd considering he is, supposedly, the most powerful man in the world.

Listen to what President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, The Seattle Weekly and Bluehost internet services are telling us about where we're headed. As I said in America Alone, multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the American tells the Soviet guy that "in my country everyone is free to criticize the President", and the Soviet guy replies, "Same here. In my country everyone is free to criticize your President." Under one-way multiculturalism, the Muslim world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west's inheritance, and, likewise, the western world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than western liberals' loathing of their own.

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threaten it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ "bad cop". Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us "Islam is a religion of peace" then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people.

Or, how about the insane political correctness at the very highest levels of our government--e.g., those institutions that are tasked with defending our freedoms:

...[A]known Hamas operative and unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history - Kifah Mustapha - was recently escorted into the top-secret National Counterterrorism Center and other secure government facilities, including the FBI's training center at Quantico, during a six-week "Citizen's Academy" hosted by the FBI as part of its "outreach" to the Muslim Community.

WTF? Or, how about NASA's Charlie Bolden, and his "outreach" to Muslims. And, who could forget Major Nidal Hasan of the US Army and his tolerant superiors?

In fact, since 9/11, I will bet that there has been more "outreach" to Muslims; more "tolerance" for Islamic violence and more excuses made for this sad religion than at any other time in history. Nevertheless, whenever anyone questions this madness, they are promptly labeled as "Islamophobic"--a term that has risen to the top of the toilet of political correctness and which floats on the same level as accusations of "racism" and "sexism" and "homophobia."

All these terms have become completely meaningless and utterly useless when used by the postmodern progressive establishment, whose only goal in bandying about such terms with reckless abandon is political power--and certainly not truth or justice.

Ayn Rand in 1981 called this "going along with it" phenomenon the sanction of the victim. She didn't realize back then that the postmodern progressive political establishment would actually glorify victimhood and raise its status to that of suicidal sainthood. She didn't realize that they would prefer that state of forced submissiveness to all others.

Steyn calls the people who "go along with it" gutless pussies and squishy liberals--both excellent descriptions. They have also been called useful idiots in another, but very related, context. Andy McCarthy calls them willfully blind.

As a psychiatrist, I see the problem this way: approximately 50% of the US population is in deep psychological denial about radical Islam (and its deathgrip on all of Islam) and demonstrate a psychological phenomenon known as identification with the aggressor first described by Anna Freud:

Anna Freud wrote a seminal book in the 1936, "The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense" in which she attempted to categorize many of the unconscious defenses people sue to keep themselves unaware of disturbing thoughts or feelings. Identification with the Aggressor is a particular defense mobilized by people in traumatic situations of victimization. In this defensive maneuver, the person who is being threatened or abused, is traumatized by terror and rage; they are helpless in the face of these overwhelming feelings and their psyche is unable to function. Once the immediate threat is over, they have a limited number of ways to deal with the terror. One way is to become like the abuser (which is why so many abusers were themselves abused in their childhoods). This is not a conscious behavior. No one decides that they want to do to someone weaker and dependent what was done to them or that they want to be "just like" their abuser. However, when one's life depends on the actions of another person, the particular terror and helplessness is an impossible combination. To survive, one must find a way to feel close to and understand the powerful and frightening authority figure. This is as true for abused children as it is for victims of horrible crimes. It is the basis of the Stockholm Syndrome. The victim must see the perpetrator as a potentially kind, even loving, person. They form an intense emotional bond with the person. It is that relationship that is evoked and feels protective when they are overwhelmed in the future.

If you want to understand why the postmodern liberal/progressive hordes have gone all squishy and gutless and that their useful idiocy sanctions their (and our) victimhood by terrorism; and if you want to understand why these same progressives stand up and defend proudly and loudly their interpretation of the US Constitution as a suicide pact; then you need to understand how fear makes people stupid and blind. And how lack of insight keeps them that way.

Having said all this, let me be very clear about one thing: many of the leaders of the postmodern progressive movement--the dead-end socialists and communists from the previous generation and their ilk-- are not in psychological denial at all. They know exactly what they are doing and their goal is nothing less than the destruction of western civilization.

For them, I reserve the term evil; because that's what they are. They are consumed by a hatred of all that is good; a hatred of life and freedom and humanity in general; This is what drives them; and this is why they admire terrorists, who are the pure, unadulterated versions of their own rotten selves.

LET'S HAVE A LITTLE CONGRESSIONAL BEHAVIOR MANAGEMENT

I saw this video of Milton Friedman initially over at Ace of Spades and I post it here because it makes a very important psychological point:


We put far too much power in the hands of these people we elect to be our representatives in Congress. The point Friedman is making, I think, is that WE, THE PEOPLE actually need to keep the power in our own hands and not give it up willy-nilly to these guys who then act like little demi-gods. We've ignored their behavior so much that they now believe they can get away with just about anything and don't have to listen to us except during an election year.

WE NEED TO MAKE THEM LISTEN TO US ALL THE TIME. WE NEED TO REMIND THEM FREQUENTLY WHO IS IN CHARGE--AND MAKE SURE THEY KNOW THAT IT IS NOT THEM.

All too often, we, the people, think our job is just to vote them in or vote them out. But it is more than that; and if we don't do anything in between, we get into the situation we are in today--a situation where they think they know what's best for us and pat us on the head and ignore us when they don't like what we're saying. "Just go back to your guns and religion," they say condescendingly to us, "and let us big, important people run the country."

Are you sick of that attitude yet? Well, you have no one to blame but yourself for giving these losers the impression that it is their own personal Congress. It is WE THE PEOPLE who chose to elect them. None of them are "entitled" to a seat or entitled to keep it.

I remember watching Scott Brown in a debate during his campaign in Massachusetts. I forget who asked him this question, but I think it was someone in the media who queried about his running for "Ted Kennedy's seat in Congress." Brown's answer wholly endeared him to me. He said something like: "With all due respect, this is not Ted Kennedy's seat--this is the people's seat."

Indeed.

If you doubt the impact of voter "behavioral modification", all you need to do is to watch the Democrat rats right now, prior to November, as they scurry over one another attempting to pretend that they didn't vote for Obamacare; that they haven't been the ones who have beggared our children's future. They are absolutely terrified of the Tea Party and are desperately trying to pretend that its very existence says something about Republicans--not Democrats (actually, it says something about all the morons in Congress who have lost touch, no matter what their party affiliation; but, since Democrats have a significant majority in both Houses, it will definitely impact them more. In fact, look how the Democrats are trying to pretend that the minority party has all this "power"--this is how the Democrats and the White House manage to 'have their cake and eat it too.')

When facing a tsunami, what do you do? Pray, and tell yourself stories. I am not privy to the Democrats' private prayers, but I do hear the stories they're telling themselves. The new meme is that there's a civil war raging in the Republican Party. The Tea Party will wreck it from within and prove to be the Democrats' salvation.

This is denial pure and simple on the Democrats' part. And, when you are in denial, just send in the clowns in a bizarre attempt to make yourself feel good and young and hip again.

Charles Krauthammer goes on in previously linked op-ed to say:

Nonetheless, some Democrats have convinced themselves that they have found the issue with which to salvage 2010. "President Obama's political advisers," reports the New York Times, "are considering a range of ideas, including national advertisements, to cast the Republican Party as all but taken over by Tea Party extremists."

Sweet irony. Fear-over-hope rides again, this time with Democrats in the saddle warning darkly about "the Republican Tea Party" (Joe Biden). Message: Vote Democratic and save the nation from a Visigoth mob with a barely concealed tinge of racism.

First, this is so at variance with reality that it's hard to believe even liberals believe it. The largest Tea Party event yet was the recent Glenn Beck rally on the Mall. The hordes descending turned out to be several hundred thousand cheerful folks in what, by all accounts, had the feel of a church picnic. And they left the place nearly spotless -- the first revolution in recorded history that collected its own trash.

Second, the general public is fairly evenly split in its views of the Tea Party. It experiences none of the horror that liberals do -- and think others should. Moreover, the electorate supports by 2-to-1 the Tea Party signature issues of smaller government and lower taxes.

[Read it all]

What this country needs is not necessarily a third political party steeped in its delusions of grandeur; what we need is a loosely-knit organization exactly like the Tea Party, to make sure that politicians from both parties do the right thing on a day-to-day basis.

Frankly, right now these irritating,over-reaching, arrogant demi-gods in Congress seem to view voters as just a piece of meat to be cut up and divided for their pet projects.


[Political cartoons by Bob Gorrell]

As Friedman notes, the voters can always vote the losers out in an election year; but the important thing is to make the loser you elected does the right thing by making an issue politically profitable or unprofitable to them, whichever works better. DO NOT REWARD BAD BEHAVIOR. STOP 'BUYING' THEIR SERVICES. START SHOPPING ELSEWHERE. STOP SUPPORTING THEM. WRITE ANGRY LETTERS; STOP DONATING MONEY TO THEM AND THEIR PARTY; MAKE PHONE CALLS; SIGN PETITIONS. WHATEVER!

Don't let them continue to lie and manipulate you. Dont' let them off the hook.


[Political Cartoons by Eric Allie]

Hold their webbed feet to the fire--in November and every day after that. You have the power, not them. Make them know it every day of their political life.

The Democrats have been in an Obama-induced haze of hopiness and changiness. They have not been listening and they will pay dearly for it in the midterms. Those Republicans that didn't listen are going to pay, too.

Can they hear us now, do you think?

UPDATE: This is the kind of voter oversight that is needed of government:

The Obama Justice Department isn’t keen on enforcing Section No. 8 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that states and localities clean up their voting rolls to prevent fraud. So ordinary citizens are doing what the Justice Department won’t — uncovering voter fraud. This report explains that 50 friends took up the effort after seeing what went on in Houston on Election Day 2008:

“What we saw shocked us,” [ Catherine Engelbrecht] said. “There was no one checking IDs, judges would vote for people that asked for help. It was fraud, and we watched like deer in the headlights.”

Their shared experience, she says, created “True the Vote,” a citizen-based grassroots organization that began collecting publicly available voting data to prove that what they saw in their day at the polls was, indeed, happening — and that it was happening everywhere.

“It was a true Tea Party moment,” she remembers.

They set up their own voter-fraud unit....[read it all]

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF "HONORING" WOMEN IN THE RELIGION OF PEACE

Andy McCarthy at The Corner catches this incredible exchange from MEMRI recorded earlier this year:

Interviewer: Wife beating is a serious accusation [leveled against Islam]. Let us examine this matter bit by bit.

Sa’d Arafat: Allah honored wives by instating the punishment of beatings.

Interviewer: Honored them with beatings? How is this possible?

Sa’d Arafat: The prophet Muhammad said: “Don’t beat her in the face, and do not make her ugly.” See how she is honored. If the husband beats his wife, he must not beat her in the face. Even when he beats her, he must not curse her. This is incredible! He beats her in order to discipline her.

In addition, there must not be more than ten beatings, and he must not break her bones, injure her, break her teeth, or poke her in the eye. There is a beating etiquette. If he beats to discipline her, he must not raise his hand high. He must beat her from chest level. All these things honor the woman.

She is in need of discipline. How should the husband discipline her? Through admonishment. If she is not deterred, he should refuse to share the bed with her. If she is not repentant, he should beat her, but there are rules to the beating. It is forbidden to beat her in the face or make her ugly. When you beat her, you must not curse her. Islam forbids this.

Interviewer: With what should be beat her? With his bare hand? With a rod?

Sa’d Arafat: If he beats her, the beatings should not be hard, so that they do not leave a mark. He can beat her with a short rod. He must avoid beating her in the face or in places in the head where it hurts. The beatings should be on the body and should not come one right after the other. These are all choices made during the process, but beatings are allowed only as a last resort. [...]

The honoring of the wife in Islam is also evident in the fact that the punishment of beating is permissible in one case only: when she refuses to sleep with him.

Interviewer: When she refuses to sleep with him?

Sa’d Arafat: Yes, because where else could the husband go? He wants her, but she refuses….

Only in the upside down world of Islam could a woman consider a beating to be "an honor". This is an Egyptian cleric on Egypt TV saying this; not some backwards jihadi hiding in a cave (even if that is the proper place for such a man). But enough about the learned cleric, Sa'd Arafat. Where are the voices of the Women's Movement condemning this kind of outrageous idiocy? Where is our foolish President, who apologizes daily for Western values and bows to Saudi princes? Where is Code Pink and others of that ilk? Where, in short, are the useful idiots of the political left on this issue?

Usually, they can be found rationalizing and aggressively supporting this deeply misogynistic and backward religion; making sure it is incorporated into the K-12 curriculum so our children accept the idea that it is "peaceful" and that we are not; and ensuring that Islam has a special place in the public sphere (not granted to any other religion) so that they won't be labeled Islamophobic-- that's where they are.

Allah knows he has some powerful (and deeply terrified)allies in the useful idiots of the political left. Take for example, the Archbishop of Canterbury's descent into multiculti sermonizing. This story is old, but it emphasizes the extent of the betrayal of western values exhibited by someone who should know better. With intellectual and spiritual leaders like Williams, the Anglican congregations should just convert en masse to Islam and be done with it. Why waste time?

Even more amazing was that Williams was simply shocked at the outrage and anger that was then directed at him after he made his remarks. He was misunderstood! His intent was only to promote tolerance, understanding and love.

Just like the GZM promoters, I guess.

But what these apologists for Islam are actually are promoting is an anti-human ideology masquerading as a religion; and one which has at its foundation a horrendous and viscious misogyny.

This article which discussed the Archbishop controversy has a fascinating exchange between Nicholas Sarkhozy and Tariq Ramadan on the subject of sharia law and its support and encouragement for stoning women:

Six million Frenchmen watched Ramadan defend the stoning of women for the crime of adultery in a televised debate with the present President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, then the Interior Minister. As quoted by Paul Berman in The New Republic of June 4, 2007, the transcript reads as follows, Ramadan refuses outright to say that he is against stoning adulteresses:

Sarkozy: A moratorium ... Mr Ramadan, are you serious?

Ramadan: Wait, let me finish.

Sarkozy: A moratorium, that is to say, we should, for a while, hold back from stoning women?

Ramadan: No, no, wait ... What does a moratorium mean? A moratorium would mean that we absolutely end the application of all of those penalties, in order to have a true debate. And my position is that if we arrive at a consensus among Muslims, it will necessarily end. But you cannot, you know, when you are in a community ... Today on television, I can please the French people who are watching by saying, "Me, my own position." But my own position doesn't count. What matters is to bring about an evolution in Muslim mentalities, Mr Sarkozy. It's necessary that you understand ...

Sarkozy: But, Mr Ramadan ...

Ramadan: Let me finish.

Sarkozy: Just one point. I understand you, but Muslims are human beings who live in 2003 in France, since we are speaking about the French community, and you have just said something particularly incredible, which is that the stoning of women, yes, the stoning is a bit shocking, but we should simply declare a moratorium, and then we are going to think about it in order to decide if it is good ... But that's monstrous - to stone a woman because she is an adulterer! It's necessary to condemn it!

Ramadan: Mr Sarkozy, listen well to what I am saying. What I say, my own position, is that the law is not applicable - that's clear. But today, I speak to Muslims around the world and I take part, even in the United States, in the Muslim world ... You should have a pedagogical posture that makes people discuss things. You can decide all by yourself to be a progressive in the communities. That's too easy. Today my position is, that is to say, "We should stop."

Sarkozy: Mr Ramadan, if it is regressive not to want to stone women, I avow that I am a regressive.

"You should have a pedagogical posture that makes people discuss things" such as stoning women, Ramadan insisted, which is to say that were he to condemn violence against women outright, he would be unable to speak to Muslim communities.

That is Williams' source. Coming from the leader of a major Christian denomination, this depth of hypocrisy is satanic, if that word has any meaning at all.

I have written about women and Islam multiple times (see here, here, here or here for example), but it is worth going over the psychodynamics of the sort of vicious misogyny that many on the left just can't bring themselves to condemn, one more time.

In "The Boys of the Taliban", Jamie Glazov wrote about one particular rule (rule 19) of the new Taliban "code of conduct" for its fighters in Afghanistan:

But there is a curious rule that the Western media has typically ignored. Rule No. 19 instructs that Taliban fighters must not take young boys without facial hair into their private quarters....

Aside from the question of what is permitted if a young boy does happen to have facial hair, this new Taliban commandment brings light to a taboo pathology that underlies the structures of militant Islam. And it is crucial to deconstruct the meaning of this rule -- and the horrid reality that it represents -- because it serves as a gateway to understanding the primary causes of Islamic rage and terror.

Rule No. 19 obviously indicates that the sexual abuse of young boys is a prevalent and institutionalized phenomenon among the Taliban and that, for one reason or another, its widespread practice has become a problem.

The fact that Taliban militants’ spare time involves sodomizing young boys should by no means be any kind of surprise or eyebrow raiser. That a mass pathology such as this occurs in a culture which demonizes the female and her sexuality -- and puts her out of mind and sight -- is only to be expected. To be sure, it is a simple given that the religious male fanatic who flies into a violent rage even at the thought of an exposed woman’s ankle will also be, in some other dysfunctional and dark secret compartment of his fractured life, the person who leads some poor helpless young boy into his private chambers.

The key issue here is that the demented sickness that underlies Rule No. 19 is by no means exclusive to the Taliban; it is a widespread phenomenon throughout Islamic-Arab culture and it lies, among other factors, at the root of that culture’s addiction to rage and its lust for violence, terror and suicide.

There is a basic and common sense empirical human reality: wherever humans construct and perpetuate an environment in which females and their sexuality are demonized and are pushed into invisibility, homosexual behaviour among men and the sexual abuse of young boys by older men always increases. Islamic-Arab culture serves as a perfect example of this paradigm, seeing that gender apartheid, fear of female sexuality and a vicious misogyny are the structures on which the whole society functions.

Glazov goes on to argue that Islamist terror can be thought of in part, at least, as a response to sexual rage, frustration, and the humiliation of being connected to a "degraded mother." Thus the men in the culture must constantly assert their masculinity, defend their masculine "honor", and strike out in rage against any who "shame" them.

This is apparent in the sexual mutilation of terror victims who are perceived as "inferior" by the Islamists, and on a par with women of their own culture. It is also seen in the Freudian symbolism of the barbaric act of beheading; as well as in the ubiquitous rape of non-muslim women around the world.

To some extent, such behavior has been seen in all cultures that debase or oppress women. In misogynistic cultures (and individuals) there is usually both the revulsion of the "whore" combined with a perverse obsession with, attraction to, and idealization of "perfection" in a woman (the "madonna" complex). In order to be idealized, women must be stripped of any hint of sexuality.
As a culture, the Arab-Islamic world has perfected this "stripping" to a nightmarish art form of shapeless, individualess, blank nothingness.

Misogyny can be defined as an unreasonable fear or hatred of women. Ever since Eve tempted Adam, women have been reviled in many ways and for many overt reasons around the world and in various cultures. They are hated and feared for their bodies, which tempt men to give into their "base" instincts; They are feared and considered "unclean" because of their monthly cycle of bleeding; they are hated for their unique feminine abilities, which are invariably considered malicious--or worse, evil--by the misogynist individual or culture.

There are three basic motivations underlying why men fear/hate/vilify women (and they are not mutually exclusive, but may exist in various combinations or all at the same time) :
-sexual frustration;
-castration anxiety, and
-resentment and anger at being dependent on women, especially the mother.

The idealization of women, on the other hand, originates from the innate desire of all humans, male or female, to return to the perfect union with the mother that each experienced in the womb.

There are also multiple reasons why women might hate other women on both an individual and societal level, and thus are often complicit in their own subjugation in misogynistic societies.

Many women hate or envy other women whose existence lowers their own status with men, i.e., other women who are more attractive than they are either in looks or accomplishment, depending on the cultural expectations. For example, in one culture a woman might attract men because of her beauty; in another because of her purity or religious devotion. A corollary to this is that the aging woman will increasingly become aware of her diminishing attraction to men or usefulness to a society that only values her reproductive capability. This sets up a dynamic tension between old and young women. In all cultures where female genital mutilation occurs, while it is the male-dominated society that mandates it, the operation itself is performed by older women on younger women; and has the direct effect of decreasing the sexual capabilities/responsiveness of the younger--thus "leveling the playing field" by some accounts. Older--"useless" women--can become societal heroes only by embracing the violence and rage of the sexually frutstrated and fearful men.

Needless to say, the family dynamics in viciously misogynic cultures like those dominated by Islamic extremists, create severely impaired girls and boys. It has been noted by many researchers and observers that children of both sexes are routinely physically and sexually abused by male relatives (indeed there are religious rules in Islam that designate under what circumstances babies may be used for sexual gratification by adults) . The boys are publicly circumcised and the girls clitoridectomized. Since a woman's behavior is the source of all shame and dishonor for the men in Islamic society, women must be ruthlessly controlled. The degree of control is proportional to the degree of sexual repression and frustration (and hence rage) that is mandated by the culture/religion.

In normal societies, the act of "mothering", which is almost always relegated to the female, may be accomplished by either females or males as long as they provide that early and continual nurturing, acceptance and security that a baby needs. The role of "fathering" can also be taken on either by females or males, particularly to the offspring of the same sex and that role usually begins at about the toddler (age 4 give or take). To raise a healthy child, healthy males and females are essential. But in misogynistic societies, the cultural debasement and humiliation of women has a profound impact on both female and male children.

Male children in societies that demonize or debase women must overemphasize their "maleness" in order to separate from the mother. As grown men, far from being able to mitigate the aggressive impulses of a child, such men will encourage these impulses in order to "prove" to the world at large that they (and later, their sons)have not been "feminized". Cultures where women have extremely low status almost always encourage the development of inadequate, "macho" men, who need to prove their manliness and constantly.

In "Where Have All The Mothers Gone?" I commented about a study which demonstrated the power of "good" mothers --i.e., normal, healthy, functioning and unoppressed by their culture-- in overcoming aggression or "bad" behavior in children. Researchers discovered that "good" mothering was able to prevent aggressive and self-destructive behavior in at-risk monkeys. In human terms, "Good" mothering provides a child with respect, love, and security-- the basic aspects of "nurture" that are essential for normal development.

The findings of this and other landmark research studies suggest that without an early mothering influence children were much more likely to grow up to be aggressive and antisocial.

From a psychological perspective then, the freedom and empowerment of women in society are absolutely critical because women are responsible for the earliest environmental influences on children--influences that will impact the child throughout his or her life. If the society has little respect for women and regularly demonizes, debases or humiliates them, the impact will ripple for generations. This is the primary reason why encouraging and promoting women's rights around the world ought to be a high priority of US Foreign Policy.

Women subjected to institutionalized, societal abuse (such as what is seen under the Taliban; and what we see to a greater or lesser extent in almost all Islamic countries--where physical abuse is sanctioned; where women are sexually demonized; where they are deprived of education, as well as physical, social, economic and political freedom) are hardly in a psychological position to be able to provide effective "nurturing" to children.

Women whose own aggressive impulses have been savagely constrained by society and who have few options to sublimate those impulses, are at grave risk of encouraging aggressive and violent "acting out" on the part of their children on their behalf-- especially the male child who must be seriously conflicted about his love for and identification with a lowly-regarded woman.

In other words, such women will hardly prevent inappropriate aggression in their offspring, when such aggression vicariously meets their own needs. And the male children will have to assert their separation and distance from the debased female that is their mother, as aggressively and violently as possible. The father, who might undo some of this early pathology is himself also in the grip of the dysfunctional societal demands, and he must constantly deal with subverting his own normal sexual drives which can only find expression through sanctioned deviancy (as exemplified in Rule 19) and aggression toward women who dare to challenge the societal taboos(i.e., unveiled women, "uppity women", or any infidel women).
Is it any wonder sexual impulses become so perverted and directed toward children? Or that child sexual abuse becomes the only societal outlet for sexuality? Or that the residual aggression is expressed in a barbaric, uncivilized manner?

Family dynamics obviously play an extremely important role in the development of personality, especially in providing values and role-models. The dysfunctional family of Middle Eastern Muslims, where women are hidden and oppressed; prevented from ever being able to grow up normally, while the sexually repressed and enraged men must avoid the shame of the feminine and must aggressively defend their honor and manhood by controlling and debasing anyone who threatens it.

Under the Taliban, which arguably is the most malignant iteration of Islam's dysfunction, women were actively oppressed and beaten for any attempt to express themselves. Even today in the 21st century, mainstream clerics in Islam discuss the "honor" of beating one's wife; and there are actual "debates" about wife-beating.

That we in the West do not sesolutely and clearly condemn such practices out of hand, shows how deeply the "multicultural/diversity" meme has penetrated and poisoned our rational thought processes and diffused appropriate moral outrage.

Finally, it is important to note that sexuality is an essential part of each individual human being. The debasement of women and female sexuality in Islam is destructive to the normal development of personality in both males and females. Psychopathic traits in males are societally encouraged, while females are conditioned to be willing victims and feel "honored" when they are beaten and abused. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to appreciate that when women seek to be the "equal" men by blowing themselves to kingdom come, there is some sort of societal psychopathogy at work--not some sort of "gender liberation".

Ask yourself how will a child can grow up normally knowing their mother thinks of them in this way? This is the ultimate consequence of "honoring" women by beating them.

Is it very surprising that a culture or religion that takes such pride in being viciously misogynistic produces both women AND men who are severely dysfunctional in almost every sphere of human activity?

RATIONALIZING SOCIALISM'S FAILURE

...And, who could do it better than Cuba?
It's all America's fault!

John Hood writes:

Cuba to Downsize Government, Expand Private Sector

The leaders of Cuba are about to embark on a program of reform, government downsizing, and privatization of some industries and services. How do I know? Because I’m such a faithful reader of the Marxist media. According to the online organ of the Party of Socialism and Liberation, the Cuban reform plan doesn’t signify a failure of socialism. It is merely a reaction to American perfidy:

The single biggest and most enduring problem for Cuba, however, is the unceasing war waged against the heroic island nation by the most powerful Empire in history. So, what can we do here? It is by intensifying the revolutionary struggle of the working and poor people in the United States against the Empire that we can render the greatest service to our inspiring and steadfast counterparts in the land of Marti.

Regarding Cuba’s past, limited expansions of private farming and enterprise, you’ll have to read the PSL’s rationalizations in order to believe them. And as for the future, somehow I doubt the pathetic kleptocracy running the island will do anything to endanger its own power — or its subsidies from Hugo Chávez.

At the rate Chavez is beggaring his own country, you'll have to wonder how long Venezuela's communist thugs can subsidize Cuba's. You can bet that it will be America's fault that Venezuela's socialist paradise falls apart, too.

Funny how the left keeps rationalizing socialism's failure to produce wealth. Admittedly, they are rather good at redistributing it (much of it into the leaders' pockets),so that everyone is poor; but the goons in charge just haven't grasped the concept that wealth production is just not something the government is able to do; and it gets harder and harder as time goes by to "redistribute" nothing--which is what you get when you demonize and/or kill off (literally and figuratively) those individuals who actually create wealth in your society.

Over the last hundred years, the letist apologists for socialism and communism have had to face disappointment after disappointment as they watched the unraveling of every Marxist prophecy about the demise of capitalism; and then had to deal with multiple socialist nightmares in the real world; instead of the fantasy dreamworld they imagined. In both theory and practice, socialism's battle for supremacy with capitalism had been decisively lost.

In every empirical test in the real world, capitalism has worked better than socialism and once and for all completely debunked all the original Marxist claims about socialism's supposed superiority.

--Instead of exploiting people, capitalism has empowered them, while socialism made them poor, miserable, and oppressed.
--Instead of increasing poverty, capitalism has mostly eliminated it. The rich get richer indeed; but the poor get richer, too. Under socialism’s yoke, everyone became poorer except the corrupt.
--Instead of being more humane and peaceful, socialism has almost always deteriorated into dictatorship and oppression; and then became aggressive and violent toward other countries

But the confrontation between capitalism and socialism in the last century was only the most recent in a long series of historical battles between the forces of freedom and individualism on the one hand; and the forces of tyranny and collectivism on the other.

We are in the middle of a battle in that long war right now in the U.S. The forces of tyranny and collectivism have a rather bland--even benevolent-- face here (except for the botoxed and artificial features of Nancy Pelosi, who looks rather scary). But under the mask, the Obama's Pelosi's and Reid's of today are not very different from the Castro's or the Chavez's in fundamental principles--or rather the lack of them. They embrace the same discredited ideas and disguise them with the do-gooder's grotesque smile. The joke is on you.

The ideas they espouse all perfectly fit into that tired old Marxist framework that thinks only in terms of the dialectical of "oppressed vs. oppressors". This framework allows the left to continually fan the fires of class warfare and victimhood and thus become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Socialism and Communism cannot fail--they are merely victims of a vast capitalist/American/Jewish conspiracy!

This is a remarkably convenient intellectual and moral escape clause for any ideology that doesn’t actually possess any solutions to real world problems.

And, this is the essence of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of today's political left. To make their systems even function minimally, they have to steal ideas from those they despise (think of the gun put to John Galt's head in Atlas Shrugged where the statists try and force him to save them from the consequences of their own policies). These bozos want to have the wealth and eat it too.

How long do you suppose it will take for this idea to catch on with our very own bozos in the White House and Congress? Not long, I suspect, because they fundamentally believe that YOU belong to the STATE. So, for them it's just the natural extension of what they're doing now; no big deal.

And when these financial wizards, like Fidel, run out of other people's money to spend, they will keep on rationalizing that it wasn't their fault; it was capitalism's; it was America's; it was the Jews; it was...George Bush's!... and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

The only people they won't blame is themselves; and the only ideas they won't demonize are their own. They are the undead; and they won't ever die--and this war will continue-- until once and for all a stake is hammered into the heart of their misbegotten ideas.

DELUSIONAL OPS

Combat Ops:


[Political cartoons by Ken Catalino]

Economic Ops:



[Political Cartoons by Lisa Benson]

SOCIAL JUSTICE: THE PROGRESSIVES' "GREAT LEAP" BACKWARDS

In a recent column, Thomas Sowell discusses the concept of "social justice":

Warm, fuzzy words and phrases have an enormous advantage in politics. None has had such a long run of political success as "social justice."

The idea cannot be refuted because it has no specific meaning. Fighting it would be like trying to punch the fog. No wonder "social justice" has been such a political success for more than a century — and counting.

While the term has no defined meaning, it has emotionally powerful connotations. There is a strong sense that it is simply not right — that it is unjust — that some people are so much better off than others.

For a phrase so warm,fuzzy and vague, "social justice" has become a critical lynchpin in the economic and social policies put forth by the left.

As it happens, Sowell has written extensively on "The Search for Cosmic Justice". (also in book form) Let me quote a bit from the essay he has written summarizing the book:

...[T]he vast ranges of undeserved inequalities found everywhere are the fault of "society" and so the redressing of those inequalities is called social justice, going beyond the traditional justice of presenting each individual with the same rules and standards. However, even those who argue this way often recognize that some undeserved inequalities may arise from cultural differences, family genes, or from historical confluences of events not controlled by anybody or by any given society at any given time. For example, there was no way that Pee Wee Reese was going to hit as many home runs as Mark McGwire, or Shirley Temple run as fast as Jesse Owens. There was no way that Scandinavians or Polynesians were going to know as much about camels as the Bedouins of the Sahara-- and no way that these Bedouins were going to know as much about fishing as the Scandinavians or Polynesians.
In a sense, proponents of "social justice" are unduly modest. What they are seeking to correct are not merely the deficiencies of society, but of the cosmos. What they call social justice encompasses far more than any given society is causally responsible for. Crusaders for social justice seek to correct not merely the sins of man but the oversights of God or the accidents of history. What they are really seeking is a universe tailor-made to their vision of equality. They are seeking cosmic justice....

Socially counterproductive policies are just one of the many costs of the quest for cosmic justice. The rule of law, on which a free society depends, is inherently incompatible with cosmic justice. Laws exist in all kinds of societies, from the freest to the most totalitarian. But the rule of law-- a government of laws and not of men, as it used to be called-- is rare and vulnerable. You cannot redress the myriad inequalities which pervade human life by applying the same rules to all or by applying any rules other than the arbitrary dispensations of those in power. The final chapter of The Quest for Cosmic Justice is titled "The Quiet Repeal of the American Revolution"-- because that is what is happening piecemeal by zealots devoted to their own particular applications of cosmic justice.
They are not trying to destroy the rule of law. They are not trying to undermine the American republic. They are simply trying to produce "gender equity," institutions that "look like America" or a thousand other goals that are incompatible with the rule of law, but corollaries of cosmic justice.
Because ordinary Americans have not yet abandoned traditional justice, those who seek cosmic justice must try to justify it politically as meeting traditional concepts of justice. A failure to achieve the new vision of justice must be represented to the public and to the courts as "discrimination." Tests that register the results of innumerable inequalities must be represented as being the cause of those inequalities or as deliberate efforts to perpetuate those inequalities by erecting arbitrary barriers to the advancement of the less fortunate.
In short, to promote cosmic justice, they must misrepresent what is happening as violations of traditional justice-- as understood by others who do not share their vision. Nor do those who make such claims necessarily believe them themselves. As Joseph Schumpeter once said: "The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie."
The next thing the idealist will do is character assassination. All those who disagree with the great vision must be shown to have malign intentions, if not deep-seated character flaws....

Ironically, the quest for greater economic and social equality is promoted through a far greater inequality of political power. If rules cannot produce cosmic justice, only raw power is left as the way to produce the kinds of results being sought.[emphasis mine]

And, of course, since they cannot ever truly achieve their social justice in the real world, what is left to them is the exercise of "raw power" in a vain and ongoing narcissistic attempt to achieve the results they want.

Let us now turn to what that exercise of raw power--that is, the implementation of "social justice"--has led to in the real world.

Here is one example :

Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.

Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".

Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.

And how about the paradise created by Kim Jung Il for North Korea?

Nor, should we forget Lenin's "great leap forward" in the USSR. In fact, here's a body count of the "socially just" communist/socialist regimes of the 20th century. All of them ostensibly on the quest for cosmic justice, making those "great leaps forward" to advance humanity...even as they wiped out large number of us mere mortals. Some humans stood directly in the way of their goals; most were just the collateral damage that was willingly paid to sustain the overweaning narcissism that drives the purveyors of social justice. As I have stated in an earlier essay on social justice and malignant narcissism (paraphrasing):

The [malignant narcissist] does not see other people as distinct individuals with needs and desires of their own, but only as fodder for the expression of an IDEAL; or as pawns for the wishes of a deified [grandiosity]. People with this narcissistic defect completely reject the needs of the individual and enslave him or her to the service of their IDEAL. Eventually, the enslavement--whether religious or secular--snuffs out human ambition, confidence, energy, self-esteem, and life.

Sowell, as usual, is spot on in his analysis. If we look at the actual, real world results of all the "social justice" crap that the left has been pushing for a hundred years,it seems only socially just to define it as: malignant social policies, which originate from the narcissistic core of the postmodern political left; in which humans are forced into a Procrustean bed of 'equality' using ruthless or arbitrary means.

And, please note that the totalitarian and authoritarian regimes which have most touted their "social justice" are the regimes most beloved by leftist intellectuals; and all their evil is rationalized by them. In fact, these intellectuals actually consider all the murderous regimes and the thugs who lead them as superior to the evil capitalist system of the U.S! It has always boggled my mind to see this in practice. When I was in college I knew people who positively revered Mao and even had posters of him in their rooms. And not just Mao. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro enjoyed the same slobbering worship; and it is exactly the way the left today slobbers all over itself in their enthusiasm for the likes of Hugo Chavez.

In fact, our social-justice-seeking progressive left has an almost unbroken string of supporting the most vile, anti-human regimes of modern times. It is the one consistent thread that runs through their irrational ideology.

Victor Davis Hanson notes:

Survey the world’s statist systems of every stripe, from soft to hard. One sees either failure and misery or stasis and lethargy. At the most extreme, a North Korea is turning into a Neanderthal society where subjects eat grass. Castro’s Cuba is imploding, and the Great Leader in his dotage is now renouncing his communist catastrophe. Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela proves that an even an oil-rich exporter can destroy itself with self-imposed socialism.

Read it all. All these societies and their "great leaps" have "progressed" backwards toward what used to be the norm in medieval times: death, poverty and misery.

Hanson notes that in general, these so-called "progressive" societies are now stampeding back toward the free market and more individual freedom--except, of course, in the U.S., where Obamanomics and Obamacare have thrust us forcefully into the standard failure mode of the political left.

Much to the puzzlement and rage of leftist intellectuals, in those places in the world where socialist and communist theory have triumphed, wealth is disappearing; initiative is in decline; and the human misery index is steadily climbing. This is the legacy of Marx's "social justice".

Instead of creating a 'utopia for the proletariat', Marx and his theories only generated the necessary conditions for societal suicide and/or societal homicide.

This is why any any advertised "great leap forward" by the progressive, postmodern political left is really a leap backwards into the primitive and uncivilized past of humanity, where human life is cheap and the State is dear.

Malignant Narcissism + Nihilism + Postmodern Politics = The Quest for Social Justice

UPDATE: For further evidence of the above equation, check this out:

Prof. Fred Gottheil told Front Page Magazine that he compiled a list of 675 email addresses from 900 signatures on a 2009 petition authored by Dr. David Lloyd, professor of English at the University of Southern California, urging the U.S. to abandon its ally, Israel. Prof. Gottheil discovered that six of the signers, who hailed from more than 150 college campuses, were members of his own faculty.

“Would these same 900 sign onto a statement expressing concern about human rights violations in the Muslim Middle East, such as honor killing, wife beating, female genital mutilation, and violence against gays and lesbians?” he wondered. “I felt it was worth a try.”

The results? “Almost non existent,” he told Front Page editor Jamie Glazov. Only 27 of the 675 “self-described social-justice seeking academics” agreed to sign Gottheil’s Statement of Concern – less than 5 percent of the total who had publicly called for the censure of Israel for human rights violations.

The refusal of women’s studies professors to publicly condemn honor killings, or academic advocates of gay rights to speak out against the treatment of homosexuals in Muslim countries, is just about as hypocritical as it gets. Their loathing (dare we call it hate?) of the UN-created Jewish state is so deep that it “trump[s] their professional interests,” leading them into a “ideologically discriminatory trap of their own making,” Prof. Gottheil added.

“The academic Left may be just a little more sophisticated [than the non-academic Left] in their loathing of Israel, but scratch the surface and it’s all the same…It turns out that with all their professing of principle, they are sanctimonious bigots at heart.”

BAD BEHAVIOR SIMPLY EXPLAINED

Evelyn Gordon at Commentary has the explanation for Hamas' escalating violence during 'peace talks'--and it isn't the explanation of conventional 'wisdom' put forth by our politicians:

Israel has suffered almost daily rocket and mortar fire from Hamas-run Gaza this week after 19 months of quiet. Yesterday, for the first time, Gazans launched phosphorus shells at the Negev. And Hamas has twice attacked Israelis in the West Bank this month, again following a long hiatus.

The response from American, European, and Israeli officials has been predictable: Hamas is escalating the terror to foil Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. But this conventional wisdom is false. And this falsehood has been undermining prospects for peace for the last 17 years.

Hamas does oppose a peace deal. But because almost nobody in either Israel or the Palestinian Authority thinks the current talks will produce one, the idea that Hamas leaders are driven by fear of the talks’ success is risible. Hamas knows quite well that the talks will fail even without its help....

So what really motivates Hamas? It’s no secret; Hamas officials proclaim it repeatedly: their goal is Israel’s eradication, and their method is armed struggle. Therefore, they will attack whenever and wherever it’s feasible.

Viewed through this prism, the pattern of Hamas’s terror activity is easily explained: terror escalates whenever Hamas officials think they can get away with it and de-escalates when the danger of a devastating Israeli response becomes too great.

Read it all.

And why is that they think they can get away with this behavior? Because they know that if Israel retaliates during any so-called 'peace negotiations', that ISRAEL will be blamed for everything and Hamas will get off scott free simply because the international community, including America, will let them. That's how it's always worked in the past and it is no different now--in fact, it is much easier to get away with it as the Obama Administration has publicly made known its hostility to Israel.

The conclusion: In short, it’s not the peace talks that cause terror to escalate but the world’s insistence that Israel refrain from responding so as not to “disrupt” them. And by taking this attitude, the world has effectively made “peace” synonymous with stepped-up terror.

For Hamas, it's a win-win situation. They get to kill Israelis AND they get International condemnation of Israel should Israel decide to retaliate.

Rewarding bad behavior always causes that behavior to escalate...any good parent or teacher can tell you that--of course, when it is a child it is one thing; when it's a terrorist organization, it's another....

2010 IS THE NEW 1984

Glenn Reynolds writes:

WAIT, I THOUGHT THE BIG THREAT WAS “CHRISTIANISTS:” Molly Norris, the “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoonist, is “going ghost.” “There’s a big Metafilter thread about it, which I’m reading after writing that. A surprising number of people are blaming Norris for bringing the death threats on herself.”

Blaming the victim is what people do, when they’re scared and don’t want to do anything about what’s scaring them.

Meanwhile, David French at The Corner discusses "The Beheaders' Veto"- the new constitutional 'right' recognized by a certain Supreme Court Justice:

In response to Justice Breyer’s comments that Koran-burning may be likened to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, I’d like to indulge in a bit of dime-store psychology

Typically, American hecklers will merely shout down speakers, throw pies at them, issue largely empty threats, and vandalize. True political violence is (thankfully) quite rare. Consequently, when courts condemn the “heckler’s veto,” they’re simply codifying constitutional common sense. How can your speech be free if petty disruptions can silence you? Why not use law enforcement to protect free speech?

The violence from Islamic radicals, on the other hand, shocks the conscience. Thousands rioting? Dozens dying? Beheadings? Torture? This level of violence is terrifying. It’s orders of magnitude beyond heckling. The manageable heckler’s veto becomes the unmanageable beheader’s veto, and judges have trouble formulating a response that protects speech and human life.

But here’s the sad reality: The violence exists no matter what we do (or don’t) say.

Indeed. And these two posts expose the kind of shoddy thinking indulged in by the postmodern political left. Let's take Michael Moron Moore, as a typical example of the shoddy thinking (as discussed by Jay Nordlinger Jay Nordlinger):

Michael Moore is all for the Ground Zero Mosque. More than that, he would like to see the mosque on Ground Zero, not just next to it. I mention this in Impromptus today. What I do not mention — and add here — is that Joe Klein of Time magazine takes the same position. Last month, he wrote, “I am, admittedly, a bit radical on this subject: I think Ground Zero itself — not a building two blocks away — would be a terrific site for a mosque, as a demonstration of American freedom, one of the truly superior qualities our nation offers the world.”

As I say in my column, why not a mosque on the Pennsylvania field? And maybe we could do something about the Pentagon?

This debate long ago got very weird. For one thing, support of the Ground Zero Mosque has become a test of patriotism and Americanism: If you object to the mosque, you must hate James Madison, the Liberty Bell, and Betsy Ross.

Klein wrote, “. . . you don’t have to agree with me. . . . You just have to like the Constitution. I love it.”

Yeah, yeah: Well, as a Constitution-hater, let me say that there’s a heavy dose of McCarthyism in the rhetoric of the Left, particularly as the Left speaks about the mosque....

The thread that runs through all these links is, as two of them directly mention, a certain deranged psychology that impairs the rational faculty. Interesting, isn't it, that those who are blaming Molly Norris, or the NJ Transit Worker who was fired for burning a Koran in his spare time; or who are accusing those opposed to the GZM of 'hating the Constitution' all seem to be completely ignoring the real problem?

Let's see if we can identify the real problem:

ITEM: Cartoonist goes 'ghost' because of threats from the peaceful followers of Islam

ITEM: Supreme Court Justice thinks constitution protects peaceful followers of Isam who might get violent because someone somewhere burns Koran

ITEM: Michael Moore thinks that we should erect a monument to the peaceful followers of Islam on the site where the peaceful followers of Islam killed thousands of American and destroyed two symbols of America; and that anyone who opposes such an idea must hates the US Constitution.

ITEM: The NJ Transit Authority fires a man because he burned the holy book of the peaceful followers of Islam.

Gee. What could be the common thread in all this?

In every case, the so-called 'peaceful followers of Islam' meme trumps the constitutional right to freedom of speech.

So, who are the ones making a mockery of the U.S. Constitution? Who are the ones who are and have been grotesquely violent? In every case, the postmodern political left has displaced a rational fear of the so-called 'peaceful followers of Islam' and instead have chosen to irrationally fear the actions of the "everyone draw Mohammed' cartoonist; they retaliate against someone who burns a book he doesn't like; and they insist that people who oppose the building of a mosque on sacred ground are haters of the Constitution.

All these actions indicate a combination of psychological displacement and psychological projection. These are two defense mechanisms that I have discussed many times before in this blog; and when used, they tend to distort rational thought and make reason and truth go through wierd contortions so as to allay the defender's intense anxiety.

In displacement, fear of something truly frightening is displaced onto a less frightening alternate: i.e., you blame a victim of violence (or threat of violence) instead of those who actually are violent or who threaten violence.

In projection, you take your own unacceptable or irrational feelings and project them onto someone else; i.e., you are busy shredding and trampling on the Constitution yourself by limiting others' freedom of speech, but you accuse them of it.

As Reynolds suggests, people do this sort of thing because they are afraid of something and they don't want to do anything about it. I would suggest that they do these sorts of things because their behavior is completely consistent with the bizarre and distorted view of reality promulgated by their ideology.

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
- 1984, George Orwell

FFREEDOM IS BEING 'TRAMPLED TO DEATH'

So, this is the way that freedom ends...not with a bang but a whimper. All our enemies have to do is threaten us with violence:

The Limits of Speech

George Stephanopolous talks to Justice Stephen Breyer:

Last week we saw a Florida Pastor – with 30 members in his church – threaten to burn Korans which lead to riots and killings in Afghanistan. We also saw Democrats and Republicans alike assume that Pastor Jones had a Constitutional right to burn those Korans. But Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told me on “GMA” that he’s not prepared to conclude that — in the internet age — the First Amendment condones Koran burning.

“Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” Breyer told me. “Well, what is it? Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?”

So, the upshot of this is that if more people rioted and killed people after idiots burned the American flag, it might be constitutional to ban flag burning too. Good to know, I suppose.

Yes, good to know, isn't it, that our fundamental freedoms are dependent on the good behavior of Muslims around the world. We all remember, for example, how well the 'ummah' behaved after some cute little cartoons were drawn. Or how Theo van Gogh experienced their rational discourse regarding his film.

Nice to know that human freedom is at the mercy of an irrational, violent, religion with no tolerance or mercy to those who disagree with it. And you thought we'd moved on from medeival times! That your life, your liberty and the your pursuit of happiness had been guaranteed to you in the Constitution of the U.S. Silly you.

It's also nice to know that our 'leaders' are willing to bow to threats of blackmail and surrender western civilization at a moment's notice.

THAT WAY LIES MADNESS

The 9th commenter on this post at Belmont Club makes an exceedingly important point:

To have a discourse there has to be some shared notion of reality, rationality, cause and effect, logic. Lacking some common parameters for the understanding of the universe there can be no discourse. Unless it is considered “discourse” to babble along with the mad in a madhouse.

This is said in reference to the idea that, "...if each side could restrain its radicals, then 'moderates' could dominate the discourse."

As the astute commenter notes, discourse requires certain fundamental shared notions. Indeed, this is the nub of the crux of the gist of the matter.

Gagdad Bob [note: corrected my error since Bob does continue to blog!]once tackled this important metaphysical issue. He wrote:

There is no question that reality is "ambiguous" and subject to multiple interpretations. However, that should not be taken as an excuse to believe that all interpretations are of equal value. Nevertheless, this latter belief is the hateway drug into the various pneumapathologies of the left, e.g., multiculturalism, moral relativism, the "living Constitution," etc.

Again, if there is no objective way to arbitrate between competing versions of reality, then it comes down to a matter of raw power. Or, as Obama put it, "I won."

This is obviously how political correctness has slithered its slithery way into every corner of reality. In the world of political correctness, it is always 1984. Take the example of Miss California. Because even beauty pageants are run by tyrannical leftists, all points of view are of equal validity. However, if you voice the incorrect truth, then you are punished. You see? Perfect nonsense -- not the liberating kind, but the oppressive kind, AKA hell.

And it is hell, quite literally, for hell is anyplace that is beyond the rule of reason -- where reason, quite simply, does not apply. ...

Actually, it is possible, so long as you create an impossible world. And the world of the left is most assuredly an impossible world, since it is literally detached from its source, its archetype, its origin, and therefore its purpose. To put it even more simply, the "absolutely relative" is an ontological impossibility, and is therefore guaranteed to generate absurdity.

This metaphysical confusion which trashes objective reality and truth has all sorts of consequences, because all the branches of philosophy are dependent on Metaphysics, which describes existence. Metaphysics leads directly to Epistemology, which concerns itself with knowledge.

METAPHYSICS (What is existence?)----> EPISTEMOLOGY (How do we know it?)

The answers derived from these two branches lead directly to the Ethics (how should we behave?) that one chooses to adopt and to the Politics (what degree of force is permissable?) that one practices.

For those of you who think all this philosophy business is too esoteric, abstract and irrelevant to your life; you are very very wrong.

Catastrophically wrong.

These ideas have everything to do with your life and how you live it. They are also the crux of why the world we live in seems to be more and more incomprehensible and insane. When you start off with the belief that reality doesn't exist outside your own head, then, it is just a very short--and minor--leap to accepting that words don't matter and can change meaning; or that it doesn't matter how you behave; that everything is relative anyway, including truth and morality. It is only a short step away to using coercion, force and ultimately violence to enforce your beliefs, since they do not conform to reality. All who point this out must be silenced or eliminated.

As Bob points out, just because reality is ambiguous and sometimes difficult to determine; it hardly gives us carte blanche to say that every interpretation is of equal value and should be treated as such. That way lies madness...and madness is exactly what we are dealing with in today's world.

Ideas matter.

Here is a perfect example of how the postmodern political left deal with reality:



And, here is how Islam and the jihadist mindset deal with it:



An individual ignores reality at the peril of his own life. Many people prefer to hold onto ideas that are anti-reality; anti-truth; anti-reason--even if it means death. Truly, they prefer to die rather than abandon their sense of superiority and the accompanying moral preening and power they exert over others. And, when a society becomes mostly made up of individuals like this; that society will always find refuge in violence and coercion directed toward those who point out their irrationality by having ideas that threaten their view of the world. In their world view, you simply silence the critics. For them, truth does not matter; all that matters is that people believe something is true. Thus it becomes necessary to destroy all those who do not believe as you do.

Beheading is actually the perfect metaphor for this ultimate betrayal of reality, since it demands that you suspend your rational mind and disconnect it from reality. The only difference between the postmodern left and these Islamic fanatics is one of degree--most of these Western pseudo-intellectuals on the left live in an ivory tower and haven't quite figured out what they must do to impose their own intellectual sharia on others--but do not doubt that they are working on it. And they will eventually come to the same conclusion as the Islamists.

METAPHYSICS ---->EPISTOMOLOGY---->ETHICS---->POLITICS

UPDATE: The madness begins, and it demonstrates exactly my point that metaphysics (one's basic premises about reality) determine politics--in this case, a certain type of political strategy we refer to as terrorism:

With European governments paring back the social safety net, and businesses blamed for creating a crisis, left-wing terrorism in Europe is on the march, according to a new report from EuroPol (the European Police Office).

EuroPol:
Spain, Greece and Italy reported a total of 40 attacks by left-wing and anarchist groups for 2009. This constitutes an increase of 43 % compared to 2008; the number of attacks more than doubled since 2007.

As in previous years, most attacks were carried out successfully and mainly targeted government and business interests.The majority of these attacks were arsons, reported by Spain, and caused only property damage.

The percentage of IED attacks decreased from 43 % in 2008 to 20 % in 2009; the majority of these bomb-ings occurred in Greece. In Greece, six left-wing terrorist organisations carried out a total of 15 attacks in 2009.

As this chart shows, left-wing terrorism dwarfs right-wing terrorism in Europe -- perhaps surprising given the attention paid to Europe's far right. Islamist and Separatist terrorism, however, remain the largest categories.

Read it all. Then examine your own premises about the initiation of the use of force to coerce others to accept your ideas and beliefs. Here is an example of our current administration doing exactly the same thing to try to prevent the catastrophic consequences of their own irrational policies. The next step for them is to begin to act like a third world dictator-controlled state, since reasoned argument is forbidden on the topic. These two links are examples of same false metaphysics in action--both ignore external reality and both are examples of the use of force to shove misbegotten ideas that cannot work in the real world down the throats of others.