Non-politically correct thinking

[Laurel]

At last! Another intelligent comment on this thread!

How ya doing Laurel?

[Edited to add: I think my original statement has been borne out by the subsequent posts on this thread.]

I'm doing good! Busy, but in a good way.

[re: your Edit: That goes without saying. ]

 

[Jimi]

Actually, Dr. Williams is a spry young man of a mere 66.

His web page is here:
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/index.html

and the gift is available here:
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/gift.html
I guess it will be no surprise that I take minor exception to this particular idea. PC is a movement whose thrust is to monitor, control and suppress the expression of some people on the pretext of being sensitive to others' feelings. That is the essence of it which is a precursor to censorship.

Rudeness on the other hand is simply boorish behavior which can be dealt with by social ostracism, etc., on a case by case basis.

The Left has become quite adept at the use of political correctness. For example, it is now a vicious personal attack or hate speech to tell the truth about a politician of the Left. Yet that same politician can tell outright lies about his opponent and that is merely astute political gamesmanship.

There is no rational reason to redefine terms which are perfectly suited to describe the condition, situation, person, thing, etc. For example, crippled or handicapped is equally descriptive as is disabled or mobility challenged. Yet the previous terms, perfectly legitimate words, are somehow insensitive. Somehow truth is becoming unfashionable. it seems, unless it is expressed in the most courteously and sensitively defined terms.

To me, this need to alter the language may well be the outgrowth of the Liberal/liberal yearning for a collectivist society. The major problem they face in this pursuit is that rational people will not buy into collectivism when it is truthfully and accurately defined.

Thus, since it is necessary to misdefine or misname one's pursuits and goals to garner political support, the need and practice carries over into their everyday dealings with that with which the collectivist does not deal well, i. e., reality.

Fuck, Bill! Where do I begin.

First of all, you Yanks have this propensity to go for the jugular, politically, regardless of one's political stripe. The GOP & Dem's share equal guilt, IMHO.

Also, you folks pride yourselves on the RIGHTS of the Individual, but often forget the RESPONSIBILITIES inherent in supporting a pluralistic Society. If that is creeping collectivism, I'll eat my hat.

Why must political discourse in the US always be reduced to "Right" and "Left" - Fuck, Man - these terms are so outmoded as to be seen as meaningless.

In the "rest" of the world, we tend to describe ourselves issue-specifically - e.g. I an quite conservative in an economic sense, but support the notion of publicly-run public services.

Wealth MUST be created before it can be distributed, but a portion of a modern Democracy's wealth needs to be allocated for public good - from Defence to Medicine. If you as a Libertarian, do not believe in taxes, then you must throw out the G.O.P. - for they will spend LOTS of dough on their agenda, most assuredly! It ain't just the Pinkos who like to spend, Man!

 

[Ishmael]

Fuck, Bill! Where do I begin.

First of all, you Yanks have this propensity to go for the jugular, politically, regardless of one's political stripe. The GOP & Dem's share equal guilt, IMHO.

Also, you folks pride yourselves on the RIGHTS of the Individual, but often forget the RESPONSIBILITIES inherent in supporting a pluralistic Society. If that is creeping collectivism, I'll eat my hat.

Why must political discourse in the US always be reduced to "Right" and "Left" - Fuck, Man - these terms are so outmoded as to be seen as meaningless.

In the "rest" of the world, we tend to describe ourselves issue-specifically - e.g. I an quite conservative in an economic sense, but support the notion of publicly-run public services.

Wealth MUST be created before it can be distributed, but a portion of a modern Democracy's wealth needs to be allocated for public good - from Defence to Medicine. If you as a Libertarian, do not believe in taxes, then you must throw out the G.O.P. - for they will spend LOTS of dough on their agenda, most assuredly! It ain't just the Pinkos who like to spend, Man!

Here's your hat jimi. Want salt with that?

The individual owes nothing to society in general, or specifically for that matter, beyond paying ones taxes and not being a burden to the community at large. To belive otherwise IS collectivist thought.

This is not a Rep. vs Dem. thing entirely. It is a creeping agenda rooted in the followers of Marx and "Das Kapital". Listen to the audio presentation in my previous post. There is a genesis.

It is only in securing the rights of the individual that the individual can have any rights at all. To presume that an individual right can be abrogated in the interest of the 'common good' is the same as saying that any right can be abrogated for the same reason. It is nothing more than the political application of 'divide and conquer'.

The concept of the individuals rights being superior to the rights of government (The collective community) was clearly in the minds of the framers of our constitution. And written about quite openly in the "Fedralist Papers" and other documents of the period.

Any group, or sub-group can be isolated for the purposes of restricting individual rights. As you move the target indicatior around eventually you can restrict everyone. That very concept is the genesis of the modern European states and the relationship that the citizens thereof have with their governments. It was observed by our founders over 200 years ago and studiously disembled and rejected.

I can find no earthly reason to return to the European model.

Ishmael

 

[Aquila]

Individual rights and individual responsibility. God how I would love that world. but it will never happen..

Why? because of the growing trend of blame everyone else on the planet. besides yourself. for whatever it is that you did.

Which in turns leads the rest of the lemmings to want to ban the activity you did or decision you made or whatever you blamed it on.

Fuck I can see our "tender hearted" little liberals calling down damnation for hurting a turkey and laughing at a human getting hurt while hunting. because its "PC"

The idea that humanity is some sort of virus is sick, but its accepted thought.

Fuck the PC world.

 

[Jimi]

Well Colour Me...

Collectivist, then.

I would rather be passed off as a Commie from the Late Senator From Wisconsin's crowd, than suggest that I have anything in common with that Hamiltonian Bravo Sierra.

Tom and Abe must be doing spirals in the ground with all this NeoCon crap in the air.

 

[Ishmael]

Re: Well Colour Me...

Collectivist, then.

I would rather be passed off as a Commie from the Late Senator From Wisconsin's crowd, than suggest that I have anything in common with that Hamiltonian Bravo Sierra.

Tom and Abe must be doing spirals in the ground with all this NeoCon crap in the air.

They probably are jimi, they probably are.

Did you listen to the audio presentation? I know that UB is going to. He'll come out loaded for bear.

PC talk in society is a trickle up(down?) thing. However where it's rigidly enforced by 'star chamber' courts, it's an abomination. And these courts are speading.

Ishmael

 

[sigh]

Sigh: Your post was answered by myself and Uncle Bill anb others before you ever posted it. What may be rude is nothing more than boorish behavior. It is NOT an offense that requires any official sanctions whatsoever. If you don't like it as an individual, speak up as an individual. Hiding behind a group to impose your will on others is as un-American as it is frightening in it's consequences.

Ishmael

I think that's what I said. Or at least I meant to. It was late and my mental processes were a bit vague, I'll admit. I specifically remember saying that anyone has the right to be offensive. And I certainly didn't suggest a need for official sanction.

I still question, though, who this "group" is that the PCer's are supposedly hiding behind. That's yet to be answered, by you, UB or any others, before or after I last posted.

I'm NOT a PC advocate, by the way. Far from it. I just don't see all the spooks in the closet you all seem to fear so much.

 

[Unclebill]

Re: Re: Times they are a'changing . . .

Originally posted by roxanne69
The term Negro was given to African Americans by racist whites...

They must be involved in a conspiracy with the same racist whites who wrote the dictionary, I'm guessing:

Ne·gro (n¶“gr½) n., pl. Ne·groes. 1. A member of a major human racial division traditionally distinguished by physical characteristics such as brown to black pigmentation and often tightly curled hair, especially one of various peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. 2. A person of Negro descent: “Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them” (Martin Luther King, Jr.). See Usage Note at black. [Spanish and Portuguese negro, black, Black person, from Latin niger, nigr-, black.] --Ne“gro adj.

Originally posted by Jimi6996
Fuck, Bill! Where do I begin.

First of all, you Yanks have this propensity to go for the jugular, politically, regardless of one's political stripe. The GOP & Dem's share equal guilt, IMHO.

Also, you folks pride yourselves on the RIGHTS of the Individual, but often forget the RESPONSIBILITIES inherent in supporting a pluralistic Society. If that is creeping collectivism, I'll eat my hat.

Why must political discourse in the US always be reduced to "Right" and "Left" - Fuck, Man - these terms are so outmoded as to be seen as meaningless.

In the "rest" of the world, we tend to describe ourselves issue-specifically - e.g. I an quite conservative in an economic sense, but support the notion of publicly-run public services.

Wealth MUST be created before it can be distributed, but a portion of a modern Democracy's wealth needs to be allocated for public good - from Defence to Medicine. If you as a Libertarian, do not believe in taxes, then you must throw out the G.O.P. - for they will spend LOTS of dough on their agenda, most assuredly! It ain't just the Pinkos who like to spend, Man!

If you've read any significant number of my posts, you would know that I have always stated that responsibility is the corollary of rights. You, the individual, are responsible for your own actions, choices, and the consequences thereof. You, as the owner of your life, are responsible for the sustenance of it and the betterment of it. You are thus entitled to ownership of whatever degree of betterment you may earn for yourself owing nothing to others beyond those mutually agreed obligations.

I also reject as vicious and evil the altruistic notion that somehow, merely because I live, that I owe someone else something. I owe to other people satisfaction of those obligations I volitionally incur. I have no legitimate means of imposing any undesired obligation on another nor they on me.

That concept is fundamental to freedom. If another is permitted to impose a coercive obligation on me, he is effectively the slave-master and I the slave since he is said to hold legitimate title to the product of my life. This is common throughout all variants of collectivism without regard to the specifics presented in its propaganda.

The common thread of them all is denial of individual rights.

You would also be aware that I've said countless times that the difference between the Left/Democrats and the Right/Republicans today is not a matter of principle, rather a matter of degree of totalitarian statism to be imposed.

And you clearly manifest your collectivist beliefs in the statement "a portion of a modern Democracy's wealth needs to be allocated for public good".

Property is not owned by the collective, i. e., society at large. Property rights are an individual attribute only. The concept of group rights is a collectivist fallacy. Any property that is redistributed must first be obtained (given by or stolen from) its rightful owner.

When it can be taken coercively, it is stolen whether it be by the thug wielding a club or a politician wielding a law: they are morally equivalent. As a personal note, however, I do tend to have a bit more respect for the club-wielding thug because he is not offering a pretense of benevolence as a cover for his crimes.

And again, may I caution you to read my posts more carefully: as a Libertarian, I believe in non-coercive, i. e., volitional taxation. That is the only fair and honest form of taxation.

 

[SINthysist]

Here Jimi, for you and Ish...


The Multicultural Theocracy: An Interview With Paul Gottfried
Myles B. Kantor
Thursday, Dec. 5, 2002

Paul Gottfried is Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College. A contributing editor to Humanitas and Chronicles, he is the author of several books including "The Conservative Movement," "Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory" and "After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State." His new book is "Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy."

You observe, "Nothing could be more misleading than to equate a multicultural society with a multiethnic one." What distinguishes a multicultural society from a multiethnic one?

Multiethnic societies have been recurrent political phenomena and involve the coexistence of more than one ethnos, that is, national community, living in the same jurisdiction. Such an arrangement has usually come about because of conquest or dynastic inheritance and until now has never required a celebration of diversity. Multiethnic societies have almost always been empires because of the way they have been formed and because of their lack of cohesion beyond the fact of what Thomas Hobbes called "acquired sovereignty." Moreover, unlike multicultural regimes, multiethnic ones do not celebrate sexual exotica or the nonrecognition of separate gender identities. Multicultural regimes are inherently subversive of traditional social relations.

You frame the multicultural question as fundamentally governmental in nature: "For all their complaints about 'political correctness,' moderate conservatives...do not devote their primary attention to the government's control of speech and behavior. The battle between supporters and opponents of political correctness is thought to be taking place among warring cultural elites." What is the consequence of viewing multiculturalism as a purely cultural phenomenon?

The fact that neoconservatives – the anti-Communist liberals, once identified with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Henry "Scoop" Jackson and Hubert Humphrey, who took over the conservative movement with only minor opposition in the 1980s – have been able to treat multiculturalism as an hermetically sealed cultural and academic problem has allowed them to go on glorifying the current American regime as the paradigmatic global democracy. (Read the second edition of my book "The Conservative Movement" for a detailed description of the neoconservative ascendancy and the marginalization of everyone to the right of the Cold War liberals.)

Their other avoidance of the truth in order to spare the government that they want to expand is presenting the state as the hapless victim of bad culture. My own perspective is diametrically opposite. It is trying to understand the role of multiculturalism as a politically enforced ideology. Multiculturalism has the same relation to the present managerial state as the Catholic Church did to medieval European monarchies. It travels in the baggage of the American empire, as was evident during the unprovoked attack on Serbia.

You often refer to "the managerial state," "the administrative state," and "the therapeutic state." What are these phenomena and their relationship to multiculturalism?

State administrations have been around since the High Middle Ages, while the managerial state refers to the social engineering, redistributionist regime that came into existence with mass democracy in the twentieth century. (Mass democracy is a term used to describe a government that rules in the name of the "people" but is highly centralized and operates increasingly without an ethnic-cultural core. It is a bureaucratic empire that distributes political favors and provides a minimal level of physical protection but is no longer capable of or interested in practicing self-government.

In "After Liberalism," which precedes my latest book, an attempt is made to plot the development of modern administrative "democracy" from a more limited and nationally focused state that existed a hundred years ago. What happened is that, contrary to what nineteenth-century critics of democracy believed, universal suffrage and urbanization did not lead to the outbreak of anarchy and violent expropriation. Rather the people voted to hand over power to "public administrators" and more recently in the U.S. judges, who became the agents for practicing democracy on our behalf. Democracy was not equated with meaningful self-rule but with being socialized by administrators, who taught us "equality" and later, pluralism and multiculturalism. )

That mass democratic regime has turned progressively therapeutic, with the advent of the cult of victims and the degeneration of Christianity into a purveyor of the politics of guilt. Question two misses a point: I am not except in a negative sense a libertarian. Through most of its history, the state, in my opinion, has been a positive force, assisting the rise of the bourgeoisie in Western Europe more than hindering that development and providing a uniform system of law protecting persons and property. The good state reached its high point in the nineteenth century but was overtaken by mass democracy and the managerial revolution in the twentieth century.

I am also not an enemy of all forms of democracy and totally approve of the management of my own town by small property-owners who come out of a shared rural culture. Unfortunately the hand of PC is already upon us as the demonic state and federal behemoths (the first is only an agent of the second) invade our civic and family life.

What are some examples of those behemoths invading civic and family life?

Examples of PC enforcement by the state are the use of Title Nine to impose verbal and behavioral conformity on male academics and workers; the various hate speech laws that exist in Canada and Europe and are applied almost exclusively against white Christian European; and the delegitimation of the historical heritage of victimizing groups: e.g., the war against Southern symbols and iconography waged, in among other areas in the US, public education [e.g., dress codes prohibiting attire with a Confederate flag].

The BBC recently had a headline, "Hate crime police raid 150 homes," about an operation in London administered by a "Diversity Directorate." Sweden recently passed a law criminalizing the "disrespecting" of homosexuals.

This attempt to muzzle traditional Christians is perfectly consistent with both the multicultural values of the therapeutic state and the thrust of liberal Christianity. In fact what is happening in England and Sweden is the disciplining by the government of Christians who have not accepted the Protestant deformation. A by now transformed Christianity, which is as grotesque in its own way as Hitler's Nazified Evangelical Church, has allied itself to the state that is suppressing Christians who will not go along with PC indoctrination.

On the matter of Hitler, perhaps the most sensitive instance of the politics of guilt you discuss is contemporary treatment of the Holocaust. You write, "By now all Christians have been generically indicted for the Holocaust, which has been extended to gays and explained in such a way as to minimize the suffering of identifiably Christian victims."

Members of my family were worked to death in Nazi labor camps; some died of typhus soon after being liberated. Needless to say, I am not a Holocaust denier. Indeed I am profoundly offended by the attempts to draw parallels between Nazi Germany and the German Imperial government, on the grounds that the latter was a "defective constitutional regime."

The Nazis were reprehensible not for establishing a second-class constitutional government but for turning Europe into a death camp. What I oppose is not the recognition by the establishment Left that the Nazis killed millions of people but the use of anti-fascism as a tool of control. This instrumentalization has been cynically carried out by political elites, European Commies, and academics throughout the West.

A very useful book on this subject in French by Elisabeth Levy shows how completely the totalitarian Left suppresses opposition in France by identifying all dissenters as Nazis or fascists. Supposedly by making a case against increased Islamicist immigration into France, one incites fascist hate and prepares the way for a second Auschwitz.

Read Peter Novick's "The Holocaust in American Life" for a striking account of the changes in Jewish attitudes about who or what caused the Holocaust. Novick maintains that what has fueled this new animus against "Nazi-bearing" Christianity has nothing to do with scholarly revelations. Rather it has arisen out of Jewish repugnance for Christianity at a time when Christians have certainly not persecuted Jews. To the contrary, Christians are the only possible allies that the Jews can now claim.

You referred earlier to "the Protestant deformation." What is it and its relation to the multicultural theocracy?

In the U.S., what the Presbyterian scholar James Kurth (see my intro chapter) calls the "Protestant deformation" has profoundly influenced the spread of multiculturalism. Although Catholic clergy, as revealed by the Italian study "L'invasione silenziosa" (The Silent Invasion), have expressed many of the same xenophile sentiments, calling for massive Third World immigration to offset Western parochialism and bigotry, in the U.S., Canada and England, Protestants have taken the lead in pushing both multicultural ideology and the politics of guilt.

Kurth tries to explain this by looking at the progressive deterioration of Protestant theology and moral culture since the nineteenth century. At the heart of the problem is the transformation of justified spiritual guilt into social guilt and the Protestant focus on the individual into a rejection of membership in a shared civilization that needs to be preserved.

What are the prospects for containing or rolling back the multicultural theocracy?

A deus ex machina that may come along to prevent the worsening of the situation I describe is the rallying by Western nations to a defense of their societies. This may be happening dramatically in Flanders whose people vote for the anti-immigration and anti-welfare Vlaams Blok. Moreover, in Antwerpen there are now armed camps with, on the one side, the Arab European League and, on the other, Flemish nationalists. While such confrontations are not particularly savory, they may prevent the Islamicists and the European Union PC bureaucracy from moving in more quickly to convulse or denature European society.

Note I do not think these battles will solve long-term problems; unless Western peoples start having families again, the social unit and population base needed for a civilization will be lacking. I do not believe that civilizations are purely or even substantially "propositional" or can be sustained by requiring courses on Martin Luther King and global democracy prepared by Harry Jaffa, Bill Bennett, and Mrs. Cheney.

While societies can assimilate, there are three presuppositions that must obtain: a core population that carries a distinctive culture that it hopes to preserve; a minority that is accepted on the condition that it eagerly embraces that majority culture; and a sufficiently controlled immigration so that assimilation is possible.

Contact Myles Kantor at kantor@FreeEmigration.com

 

[Jimi]

Here Jimi, for you and Ish...

While societies can assimilate, there are three presuppositions that must obtain: a core population that carries a distinctive culture that it hopes to preserve; a minority that is accepted on the condition that it eagerly embraces that majority culture; and a sufficiently controlled immigration so that assimilation is possible.

In his summation, he brings forward the crux of the whole concern. I agree with the thesis absolutely, but with the Pink heart of a "Collectivist"