A Meeting on the Dark Side of the Moon

My friend Jeramayakovka wrote an interesting comment to my last post. Referring of the Islamist’s constant refrain of loving death more than life he wrote:

"In those Hamas remarks, I hear a strategic taunting based on raw willpower. The message is to win. And in order to win, to intimidate. A deathcult, if you will, but in service to a nuts-and-bolts strategy"

.
To which I replied:

"Very thought provoking comment. The way insecurity and weakness flip-flop with determination and desperation is a very unstable dynamic.
Bottom line, I think is that while they are destroying themselves we have to spend our energy on minimizing the damage and death they cause... Hitler, after all destroyed himself, but the rest of the world waited far too long to begin helping him do it.
Thanks for making me think"

While I still think there is some validity to both J’s comment and my reply, on reflection I have come to see that there is a deeper, more elegant and (in a way) simpler truth. I have come to see that, granting that this is a stratagem, consciously applied, it is also a compulsion- an irresistible impulse. As such, it is also a clear-cut, unambiguous, text-book diagnostic symptom of the presence of fascism.

No, the love of death is not just a ploy or bluff. It is the central argument of fascism in action. In my post on totalitarianism and why the Jihadists are truly fascists, I quoted Louis Menand writing in the New Yorker:

“The distinctive feature of totalitarian societies is that everyone, including (in theory, anyway) the dictator, can be sacrificed in the name of a superhuman law, a law of nature or a law of history.”

Menand went on to quote Hannah Arendt:

“Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men but toward a system in which men are superfluous,”

That is why they can (have to!) say they love death. That is what we are fighting- the meaninglessness and expendability of the individual.

Let's be clear. It is not just Sarah Philipps and 269 other innocent people on an airliner or three thousand people on a bright September morning, YOU do not matter in their system. No individual does- the concept of an individual with a life, possessions and any expectation of privacy is null and void.

That is why they disdain freedom and democracy, because under freedom and democracy you, the individual, matters the most. This also clears up a few questions that periodically plague us.

This is, for instance, what the far-left collectivist Progressives have in common with the Caliphate Islamists. It is precisely why, even though they are diametrically opposite each other on so many issues, they find common cause against those of us who love life and think we matter.

It is, maybe, even the ultimate explanation for Jew hatred among those groups. After all, the first assumption of Judaism is that God gives the individual the responsibility to behave as best we can. There is an expectation that what we do and how we do it matters- not just to God but to each other and the future of the universe. This is one of the wellsprings and strengths of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

It is as though, ill-equipped to compete intellectually, morally or economically with western democratic success, they have removed themselves from the planet of liberty and reason. There, on a close but barren moon they do a wary dance of cooperation. Unable to fully accept each other in the light of day, the Islamists went as far east as they could and the Leftists went as far west and they have met to form an alliance of ignorant conspiracy on the dark side of the moon. Agreeing to remain blinded to each other’s contradictions by the darkness there, they conspire against the free, green and hopeful world they envy and despise.

Addendum:
Please, don't forget my last post and that Sarah Philipps' Birthday is only two days away. I plan to place flowers and a copy of the signatures to the petitition on the monument in Newton Centre Park on her birthday and I would like it to be a lot bigger than it is now. So if you haven't yet signed this is you opportunity! Please, email this link to your friends and family too!

Cultural Insanity Part III: Arrested Development and Agitated Senility

The relationship between leftists and Caliphate Islamists reminds me of an old joke:
Q. Why do little children and their grandparents have such a special and loving relationship?

A. They have a common enemy.

Those of you who, like me, are in “the sandwich generation” it will be especially obvious that the common enemy referred to is the responsible, working adults who take care of both the child and the grand parents. I offer this joke for two reasons. The first is as an introduction to the central point of this post which revises the concept of this Cultural Insanity series. The other reason is that it is a allusion to the plethora of issues having to do with my elderly parents and young children that have contributed to the unusual amount of time that have elapsed between my last post and this one.

I have been away for a while but I have also been busy. As I outlined in the first two posts of this series, I believe that Western Civilization is threatened by cultural pathologies both from within (the latest incarnations of the socialist/communist/progressive left) and from without (Caliphate Islam). I have also remarked that although the left and Caliphate Islam have virtually nothing in common and, in fact, have diametrically opposed values they share two things, a virulent hatred for western civilization and a problem with visualizing the future. These basics have not changed but I need to take this time to tell you about a major realignment of my underlying theory.

As I have been toiling at what I had envisioned as the last post of this series I have gotten some very important input from a few very astute commenters. They have helped me evolve my ideas on the fly. It is now clear to me that I will actually need four more posts after this one to bring this series to its full development. Each of the ensuing installments will focus on one of the four cornerstones of the program I envision to revitalize Western Civilization.

The most recent and galvanizing of these new influences came in the form of a very insightful comment from an anonymous but very perceptive person who comments under the name of MeTooThen. So that you don’t have to go look here are the lines of the comment that hit me the most directly:

“I'm not so sure BPD is the right fit.

Perhaps Narcissistic
Personality Disorder might be a better fit but in reality the personality
disorder of the left and the Islamists is what a former colleague called "A
dirty Axis-II" to describe the constellation of signs and symptoms.

There is much to the notion of Narrative and the Self in the world
today, especially with so much of our politics seemingly an extension of
identity.

It's also true that the Islamists and Leftists use the
identity or narrative of victim as a way to shape their intrapersonal and
interpersonal views.

Rarely do we hear that the Palestinians (or
Islamists) are the agents of their own behavior (Bret Stephens wrote a very
powerful essay about this, but I can't seem to find it), rather the vectors of
force and initiative are always acting upon them, e.g. Hamas' brutality is the
result of occupation.

Again, these are notions of Self and Narrative.”

Hmmm..., Narcissism and identity- narrative…, being compelled to feel and act in certain ways by powerful forces (imagined or real). Among the several bells this comment set off in my mind the loudest was a connection to a theme that I have come back to in my ruminations repeatedly but have always shied away from. In many ways, the behavior of the left is not so much an analog of mental illness more like an analog of normal human adolescence.

The Caliphateists are, in many ways like the senescent but imperious widow of a wealthy man. They know their days are numbered and that theY hold more power and wealth than they deserve. They are quick to take offence because they are not so stupid that they cannot see how futile and ineffectual they are. They are alternately (or even simultaneously) invincibly confident in their power to cause pain and menace, pathetically fearful on account of their vulnerability to the effects of time and, above all, humiliated by the obvious emptiness of their pose of power and the unearned nature of their wealth. They spend their tortured days in a defensive and agitated rage against the world that is passing them by.

Like a nightmare version of the doddering grandparents in the joke, the Caliphateists want to return to and live in the past- they long for the “good old days” when the Muslim empire was young, strong and spreading by the sword. They would like to obliterate the modern world and return to that simpler time when truth was proven at the point of a scimitar.

The leftist, like the unruly, sullen and ungrateful child in the joke, basks in the comfort and protection Western Civilization and even though he knows that it is that very same civilization which provides his food, safety, resources and most ironically, the protection of his rights, he looks down upon it with condescension and even contempt. Although he cries out for “everything to be different” and he expresses vile hatred. Deep inside he doesn’t really want to bring it down; he just wants to irritate and impede it from growing, improving and passing him by. He pretends to want to change it even as he depends on it to support his life. He lives in fear that the incompetent recesses (such as much of academia) where the left thrives will someday become part of the competitive marketplace and be made to respond to its evolutionary pressures.

In fact, if senile Islam and the idiot teenager of the left ever formulated and verbalized their separate visions of the future they would be so diametrically opposed that they would recognize each other as mortal enemies. The two are both so phobic of and in such denial about the future, though, that they, for the time being at least, allow their shared resentment of mainstream Western culture to be the foundation of an alliance between them.

Indeed the left, with its petulant attitude and specious attempts to undermine the moral and intellectual standards of our culture has always seemed to me to be behaving in a very similar way to a manipulative teenager.

Leftists indulge in startling feats of moral blindness that are redolent of adolescent immaturity. For example, when they equate, or even hold as morally superior, the Palestinian use of children as suicide bombers in the killing of innocent civilians to the Israelis’ occasional accidental killing of bystanders while eliminating known terrorist leaders, they, analogous to a bright but immature teenager have merely shown that they are capable of performing logical manipulation of ideas but have not gained the level of engagement with reality to be able to distinguish the moral values needed to fully understand what they are saying. When they ignore or reason away human nature and the economic realities of the world in order to advance the impractical and unworkable progressive (or social democratic or whatever other pseudonym they are hiding the essential socialism with this year) doctrine, they are engaging in the adolescent penchant for wanting to believe that the world could be fair and “nice” if only people would stop being the way they are. In short, he is aping the alienation and compensatory anger of a teenager. The leftist is often only saying the equivalent of “I hate you; you are so lame” -being angry, manipulative, moody, and verbally aggressive after the fashion of a confused teenager who has been allowed too wield much power in the family by an over-tolerant liberal parent.

So, the question arises: If there are more or less normal (in the sense of non-pathological) models for this behavior, does this mean that I no longer think that the left and the Caliphate represent Cultural Insanity? Not in the least- in fact this is even more scary than my original scenario. When thirty, forty and fifty-year-old people continue to behave and think like sixteen-year-olds and when a moribund, outmoded, unproductive culture like The Caliphate gets hold of the kind of underserved but vast wealth and power that oil has handed them it is a very abnormal situation and very serious harm is being done. When found in these new contexts, the usually irritating and counter-productive, sometimes infuriating and sometimes dangerous behavioral complexes of the adolescent and the senescent become dangerous both culturally and physically.

The good news is that it would seem as though these twin models of arrested development and agitated senility offer more promising and intuitively accessible paths to resolution than the ones based upon either Borderline Personality, Narcissistic Personality Disorder or even Dirty Axis II. In the next four posts I will be offering four distinct approaches of what might be called Civilizing Cultural Therapy that can provide an antidote for the anti-civilizational poison we are fighting. The Story, dealing with the power of personal narrative as a civilizing influence, is the first of them, (I hope to have that up by next Monday or Tuesday) Science, God and Law will follow.

The End of Reason

I have been working on the next installment of my Cultural Insanity series and it is on the way, but since posting the first part I have seen something related to it that I would like to report as a separate post. Frankly, I have been a little distracted by monitoring the response to my first Cultural Insanity post; after all although I was trained as an anthropologist and not unfamiliar with psychological theory, in making the analogy between a personality disorder and two very different cultural sub-groups, I was treading on somewhat unfamiliar ground.

I was elated when ShrinkWrapped, a psych-blogger whom I respect enormously picked up on my ideas and posted a not unsupportive discussion of it mixing in material fro Dr. Sanity and Victor Davis Hansen. of it.

A day or so later Solomonia put up a post citing the video of a classic television confrontation between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and “an anti-American Canadian interviewer”, Avi Lewis of Canadian Television.



Lewis, in this clip, personifies the smug, self satisfied, passive aggressive argumentation style of the “progressive left”. But the very slickness of his approach combined with the emptiness of his arguments alerted me to something that I had never realized before about the way they argue. I saw immediately that I had identified another aspect of the psychological blindness that the lefties and Islamists have in common. It points back to my original diagnosis of Borderline Personality.

… They (the left and the Islamists) focus, as Avi Lewis does in this interview,on picking out isolated examples of widely disapproved of, squalid and reprehensible behaviors from Israel, America and The West (as when Lewis says “they shoot abortion doctors in the US”)and insisting that they are proof that we, as nations and a civilization, are not living up to our high ideals. Thus Israel, The U.S. and the west is held to account for an idealized, utopian standard of perfection without margin for error. The fact (and they never stoop to dispute the fact) that Israel, America and the west in general are far better in comparison to the rest of the (far more squalid and reprehensible) real world is avoided when possible and brushed off as rationalization when unavoidable. In the event that it is pointed out forcefully that the rest of the world is so much less democratic and desirable and that it is always an option to leave and that no one leaves- in fact, America is still the great magnet of immigration it has always been as Hirsi Ali does here the leftist will always shift the subject. Lewis counterattacks with a jocular but passive aggressive suggestion that she must have had to go to a special school to learn “these American clichés” as part of her application process”. This begs the question which Hirsi Ali asks this dope- "why don't you and your leftist friends go somewhere else?" Naturally, they'll never admit it but there IS no other place that they could tolerate and there is certainly very few that would tolerate them.

For the sake of accuracy I must point out that what I described in the last three sentences above did not occur as I first described it in that comment. What Hirsi Ali actually said was that she did not believe Lewis’ description of the plight of Muslim Americans was nearly as dire as Lewis described it to be. And she offered the opinion that if they were truly feeling under siege that they would do what other people all over the world have done when they have felt to be under siege, they would move away. She pointed out that there is no such population movement as this taking place and that there would not be. The first time through I had thought that I heard this exchange to include a challenge to Lewis on why he persists in living in a western country. I was mistaken. I believe that if she had made that challenge, the exchange would have gone much as I outlined it.

After seeing this post and responding to it in the comment stream I continued to reflect on this new insight into this essential similarity in tactics between the Islamists and the left. It was beginning to occur to me that there was something else, something deeper that I had not reached yet.

Meanwhile, for two days the comment trail on ShrinkWrapped’s post had been quite supportive- until someone with the screen name copithorne wrote a comment using a tactic out of the same family. Since I quote copithorne’s full comment in my reply I’ll let my reply speak for both…

A two sentence fisking:

copithorne says:

"Diatribes about "the left" in which no "leftist" appears -- no quotes, no policy positions -- are expressions of projection of a disowned shadow."

I say:

Leftists who don't bother to read a sincere analysis thoroughly enough to observe that it actually began with a live example of a leftist argument and then label such analysis as “diatribe” are intentionally projecting their own aggressive rejection of discourse on the conservative analyzer. It is not necessary (in informed and reasonable circles) to have exhaustive actual quotes of Hitler’s hate speech to know that he was a genocidal anti-Semite. It is not generally in question that Lenin and Stalin tried to institute a paradise of the workers by slaughtering, starving and persecuting them in their millions. Just so, if characterizations of the left hit their mark and sting to the degree that the only feasible defense seems to be a trivial
pettifogging by attacking the lack of “quotes” and “policy positions” it means that he has no real rebuttal for the characterizations themselves. It is a disingenuous trial lawyer’s trick to subvert meaningful point/counter point with meaningless "discovery” of inconsequential minutia. Note that he neither actually points to a faulty idea nor does he contradict anything ShrinkWrapped, Dr. Sanity, VDH or I say. If there is a disowned shadow in the neighborhood I say copithorne might do well to look and see if it’s connected to his own feet.

copithorne says:

This currently seems to be the total sum of contemporary conservative politics -- the appeal of having enemies on which a person can project material of which they are unable to be self-aware.

I say:

Who is projecting here? All I see is customary leftist rejection of all contradiction to his “ideas” on any technicality no matter how flimsy or arbitrary. It’s the pedant’s refuge, rejecting the student’s ideas and labor because they are beyond him with the
stinking hypocrisy that his footnotes are in the wrong format and his bibliography is not long enough.

So, up to this point, I have been concentrating on understanding how this method worked on a practical level. Now I had begun to see clearly that it was not just intentional blindness to (and twisting of) the the reality of the situation but, in fact, reflected the selective vision of splitting and dissociation. Assuming the unearned and undeserved position of moral, spiritual and intellectual superiority they are not open to dialog but insist on ignoring what we say and either “correcting our papers” or rejecting our thoughts and ideas on technicalities.

Then, on the blog Cuanas, I found another posting of the Lewis/Hirsi Ali interview with this comment posted by a fellow named Irfan Yusuf.


Irfan Yusuf said...

So let me get this right. This woman has little or no knowledge of the varieties of religion or communities she criticizes (apart from her own Somali upbringing).

She was caught by the Dutch telling lies to gain migration status. She told Ian Buruma that she committed "immigration fraud".

And now the Americans are lapping her up as some kind of long last(sp) daughter. Had she not been so anti-Muslim, you'd have tossed her in immigration detention yourself, if not in Guantanamo Bay (heck, her name is "Ali" and that's a common Ayrab (sp) terrorist name, isn't it?).

I can't wait to see how your evangelical conservatives behave when you realize (sp) she is pro-abortion and wants those teaching creation science to be thrown into prison.

What I see here is more like squirming to keep from seeing the truth. At a loss to prove Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrong or even mistaken about anything, Irfan does a crazy little Islamic tattletale dance (oooh, look she is a baaaad girl! Don’t talk to her! Don’t listen to her!) while at the same time accusing us of being blindly anti-Muslim. Here is the answer I posted:

Mr Yusf, exactly how much do you have to know about a bunch of communities in which the leaders and the apparent majority of the citizens consider anyone who worships a different God less human, practice honor killing, celebrate the killing of innocents in terror attacks and vow to make the entire earth into a Caliphate where everyone will be subject to the terror of Islamofascism in order to be qualified to criticize them? Something tells me that when her co-filmmaker and friend Theo Van Gogh was butchered in the streets for the film they made together and a threat against her was pinned to him with the murder weapon she earned the asylum of the United States of America.

If you think a technicality like a lie she told in order to insure her own escape from the hell of living under Islamic rule is going to persuade us to think less well of her you are even more blinded by your cultural disease than most of your compatriots. It’s pathetic that you write it as though we might think that it invalidates what she says and writes. Is that all you've got?

I should also have pointed out to Mr Yusuf that even if some of the more literal minded Christian evangelicals do not find her positions on abortion and evolution to be in agreement with theirs, they will issue no fatwas calling for her death, neither will they justify trying to treat her as a second-class citizen for it. Oh well, he wasn't really listening anyway...

I have been trying to pull this all together in my mind and, in the end, I keep remembering a short, pathetic little comment on ShrinkWrapped’s post that I had ignored as twaddle at first. The commentor’s screen name is Post Hole Digger, which I assume means he is a PhD in something.

Huh, here I thought that what I wanted was to see a world of peace and kindness,and to do toward others as I would want done toward me. I am now ashamed to admit, but I even thought that was actually a good thing. But now you explain that I'm really just insane. Instead of virtues, I have a grave psycho/emotional dysfunction. I just never realized.

This is not twaddle, it is the cry of a lost soul. Post Hole Digger is right, only his sarcasm is misplaced. Both Islamism and Leftism are attempts to see a world of peace and kindness. That is very nice to say but the unfortunate fact is that this is not a world of peace and kindness. There is no such world. This is a world that contains peace and kindness along with hatred, love, avarice, generosity, violence and cruelty. Both Leftism and Islamism are nothing more than ideologies that pretend to be able to control and rationalize the unfathomable complexity of life.

To anyone not enmeshed in their borderline systems the actual out come of their utopian schemes, proven out in the past, is obvious.

The Islamists would have their Caliphate where everyone and everything would submit to the will of Allah. That sounds OK until you ask who is interpreting Allah’s will for us. As it has turned out in the past, it has most often been the most bloodthirsty political infighter or conqueror capable of rising to the top of the Shari a system who has gotten to say what’s on Allah’s mind. The best that The Caliphate has been able to offer in the past has been the more moderate, slightly less megalomaniacal son or grandson of the deceased bloodthirsty political infighter or conqueror.

As for the poor, deluded lefties like PHD, they are destined to be frustrated by their efforts to help their fellow man. But for all their talk about equality, sharing, peace, love and understanding, if put to the test of leadership, they would, like all other leftist/socialists who have ascended to leadership (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Hitler, Pol Pot, etc…) turn to violence, coercion and despotism out of their exasperated zeal to reform humanity against its wishes and nature. It is not insane to do toward others as one would want done toward one's self- that is a great moral principal- but it is insane to assume that others are on the same program and have the same vision of what is good.

Cultural Insanity - Part I - The Diagnosis

I’ve been quiet for a week and as you might know by now that means I’ve been working on something big Here is the First of a two part essay-

In a recent post on his own blog Richard Landes printed a letter he had received from someone who had heard him interviewed on the radio. The letter cited numerous “facts” that were obviously false and claimed to point to evidence that was clearly “cooked” and kneaded into a pungent soufflé of anti-Israel canards.

Landes, never one to miss a challenging “teaching moment”, wrote a lengthy reply. In the course of his reply, he addressed the superficial reasonableness of the letter writer’s arguments. He wrote:

“The important point here is not that your position isn’t “reasonable” — and as supported by evidence as mine. It’s a legitimate one. And under normal circumstances, we could agree to differ, just as Ptolomean and Copernican astronomers could differ without grave consequences in the 16th century. But don’t try to send a space ship beyond the solar system using Ptolomean calculations.”



It might seem that Landes goes a little too far in his charitable concession that his interlocutor’s point of view was “reasonable” and “just as supported by evidence” as his own, but Landes is following an honored and sadly neglected academic method, one that is designed not to merely support a point of view in a contest but rather to test it against alternatives and see which one is more successful at describing reality. So without looking any further than the narrow frame of reference in which the letter writer framed his point of view, they seemed just to present competing and equally valid ways of looking at the situation.

Landes’ then proceeded to widen the frame around the argument to show that, like the Ptolomean system, the narrow view taken by the radio listener does not work once you expand the frame to a wider and more comprehensive view of reality. The Copernican system is, of course, much more useful in space travel because it more closely approximates the real positions, relationships and movement of the heavenly bodies; and Landes’ view is much more robust and able to account for the reality of the conflict between Western Civilization and those who wish to rule the world with collectivist systems.

That point, elegantly stated, traces the stark fault line between the strangest sets of bedfellows the world has ever seen and the most successful civilization in history. The fatally conjoined, murderously quarrelsome twins of the Sunni and Shia Caliphate Cults and the liberal/socialist/communist/collectivist bastard children of The West (fascists all !) all have this in common, that they simply lack the ability to see the cultural frame of world events in any but the narrowest perspective. This is more than a willful blindness and it is not a product of stupidity of ignorance either. As I observe the smug, suicidal behavior of the progressive/socialist/liberal left and compare it with the belligerent, intolerance of the Caliphate Muslims seem to me to be in the grip of a similar kind of mental illness. They are all “collectivists” and there is something about people who believe in giving up one’s rights and prerogatives to a group of any kind that renders them unable to behave in a broader self-interest- even while they believe that they are doing the righteous thing. One way to explain this apparently inexplicable behavior is that it represents a cultural analog of a mental illness known as Borderline Personality Disorder.

I am not in favor of criminalizing or dehumanizing people because of their ideas and I believe that calling anyone that disagrees with you “insane” is an intolerant and unproductive tactic. I also Acknowledge that, just as it is dangerous and inexact to apply models of animal behavior to human beings, and that it is perhaps even more tricky to project individual psychology onto social and cultural groups Nevertheless, the parallels here are striking and, I believe, very instructive.

Wikipedia defines Borderline Personality Disorder this way:

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is defined as a mental illness primarily characterized by emotional dysregulation, extreme "black and white" thinking, or "splitting", and chaotic relationships. The general profile of the disorder also typically includes a pervasive instability in (1) mood, (2) interpersonal relationships, (3) self-image, (4) identity, and (5) behavior, as well as a disturbance in the individual's sense of self. In extreme cases, this disturbance in the sense of self can lead to periods of dissociation.[1]

Dissociation is the key. The leftist and the Islamist (infact collectivists of any stripe) are dissociated from their own very natures. They deny basic human truths in a defensive but doomed effort not to have to deal with issues that cause them tremendous anxiety.

Wikepedia continues:


“The disturbances suffered by those with borderline personality disorder have a wide-ranging and pervasive negative impact on many or all of the psychosocial facets of life, including employability and relationships in work, home, and social settings. Comorbidity is common; borderline personality disorder frequently occurring with substance use disorders and affective disorders. Suicidality and completed suicide are possible outcomes without proper care and effective therapy.”

Whether it is the abrupt and violent suicide culture of such diverse groups as al Qeada, Hamas and Hezbollah or the slow cultural/intellectual suicide of multiculturalism, it is compellingly apparent that the definition applies in both cases. Caliphate Islamism and Leftist liberalism both predispose their adherents to lose the ability to see the wider moral and ethical frame of the world around them.

This explains why, even though their idiosyncratic and xenophobic ideological systems are mutually contradictory, they don’t find it important to argue with each other. That’s because at the moment the contradictions amongst them are orthogonal - that is to say, in the presence of the dominant Western and American cultural and political influence, they really don’t interfere with each other. Their common disease makes them natural allies against that larger, more psychologically stable power structure that seems to them to humiliate and mock them by its very existence.

Of course, that alliance would evaporate the instant one of them ever got into a position of power. As soon as Islamists take over in an area, whether in Iraq, Waziristan or (most recently) in Gaza, they immediately behead, shoot, disembowel and torture anyone that represents moderation or reasonableness. The left, given the opportunity, in the USSR, China, Korea and Cambodia has always done the same. But while Western civilization is the common enemy, an Islamic Caliphateist who believes that women are inferior to men can accept (or at least ignore) the ranting of an anti-Israel socialist woman who believes that no human being is any more deserving than any other because she, as he does, finds it so much more important to deny the reality and moral superiority of Israel- a country whose founding principals are not orthogonal to but directly opposed to his. Indeed, the very existence of Israel is a challenge to his most basic beliefs and desires. She, on the other hand, remains blind to the plight of Muslim women and the lack of even the most rudimentary freedom of expression in the Muslim Caliphate because she has dissociated those things- split them off from her reality because they are intolerable for her and her illness has so weakened her that she cannot contemplate them.

Wikipedia provides this a list of diagnostic criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR). The presence of five out of nine of these is considered diagnostic of borderline personality.

Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment…
A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, promiscuous sex, eating disorders, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). [Again, not including suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5]
Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-mutilating behavior.
Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
Chronic feelings of emptiness.
Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.

I’ll admit at the outset that my definition of the progressive/socialist/liberal left is pretty broad and fuzzy around the edges. To try to define it down would be to miss the point. My point is that beyond a fairly narrow band close to the center of the political spectrum, the left has so swallowed the failed progressive agenda that they all suffer from the same cultural malaise. Here are the symptoms I see for the left:

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment…
a. Objections to the Israeli Security fence and the Mexican border fence.
2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
a. The idealized view of Caliphate Islam as “freedom fighters” and “non-materialistic religious devotees while at the same time devaluing them with the “racism of lowered expectations” by not holding them to the same high standard in human rights, public discourse, child welfare and civil governance as expected of other people.
3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
a. Self-hatred:
i. Concentration on the “human rights record of Israel” while the Arab/Islamic, Chinese, Korean, Zimbabwean and Rssian records are orders of magnitude worse
ii. Public displays of disgust with America even though it is the greatest country and most finest democratic experiment in the history of mankind
4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, promiscuous sex, eating disorders, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). [Again, not including suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5]
a. Advocacy of sex-education that emphasizes techniques and birth control and derides abstinence and relationship counseling.
b. The introduction of legislation to control the content of food beyond basic safety standards. The move to outlaw trans-fats in some locals is symptomatic of food-faddism and group eating disorders.
5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-mutilating behavior.
a. Multiculturalism leads to the inability to discriminate between right and wrong and to protect the culture from death-cult attacks
b. Persistent belief that “War is Not the Answer” even when an enemy has sworn to destroy and rule over you.
6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness.
8. Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.
a. Conspiracy Theories (9/11 truth movement, Bushitler stole the election)
Well, there’s six, a diagnosis plus one. I’m sure there are a lot more- suggestions and additions are welcome …

Here’s my take on the symptoms of The Caliphate:

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment…
a. Objections to the Israeli Security fence
2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
a. Humiliation and rage over everything The West is and does stems from the dissociation of the knowledge that their culture is actually inferior.
b. Honor killings
c. Rampant child and sexual abuse
4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, promiscuous sex, eating disorders, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). [Again, not including suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5]
5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-mutilating behavior.
a. Suicide martyrdom raised to a cultural ideal
6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
a. The “Arab Street” in general
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness.
8. Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
a. The two Intifadas
b. The Cartoon-ifada
c. The Pope-ifada
d. The Paris street riots
9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.
a. Jew Hatred
b. Dhimmi laws
c. Conspiracy theories (9/11 was an Israeli plot, etc)
There’s six there too. It’s only six because of time restraints- suggestions and additions welcome here too.

Let me make it clear, I’m not a psychiatrist or psychotherapist so I don’t know what the prognosis is for individuals with this disorder or what price their family members and neighbors pay for their proximity to them. I do have a degree in anthropology, however, and I am able to see into the cultural scale of the problem. It is not hopeless but is is frightening.

Loren Eiseley who was a great anthropologist and paleontologist of the old school, knew the pathology of culture well. In his great essay The Star Thrower he wrote, “Man would kill for shadowy ideas more ferociously than other creatures kill for food, then, in a generation or less, forget what bloody dream had so oppressed him.” That is culture on a rampage. My next post will focus on the hope for recovery and reconciliation.

The Terrorism of Deconstruction

There is an old joke about a missionary and a cannibal. If it seems a little silly at first, let it sink in a little…

One day the missionary was trying to explain why cannibalism is bad. He says to the Cannibal, “God created man to be but little lower than the angels. For that reason alone it is wrong to kill and eat people.”

The cannibal thought for a moment and said, “Then why did he make them out of meat?” This joke is not about real missionaries and cannibals, it is about the heart of Western Civilization confronting the Agélaste Left.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” he was setting forth a broad and revolutionary presumption - Humans have rights. Jefferson attributed the source of those rights to God as did many philosophers of his time but they were never actually rights in the real world until they were codified and written into The Bill of Rights which is the cornerstone document of the United States of America- more critical even than the Constitution.

I am not saying that Jefferson invented the idea of rights. He was, obviously, building on the principals of respect for the individual that spring from the book of genesis, derive from Greek Philosophy and were firmly established in practice the Magna Carta. But Jefferson crossed the last significant frontier by turning the view of rights around. He viewed the rights of man as the signal aim of governmental structure rather than an adjunct and a foil to the rights of a king.

Prior to the rise of the United States and the other constitutional democracies of Western Civilization there were no rights for the common man. There were only the divine rights of kings and churches which were enforced by the application of power. The concept of rights evolved slowly as the human race evolved culturally. At every other evolutionary level of cultural complexity, from the family, to the hunting/gathering group, to the tribal society, to the monarchy and all the way up to the despotic rule of the totalitarian state, the rest of human experience has been and is without rights as Jefferson understood them. Until the American experiment there were only functions and duties to be fulfilled with the occasional “favor” of some small freedom. It is only in the upside-down logic of the left that rights are assumed to exist independent of the deity and/or government.

Here is a short definition of the word “citizen” that I like. I found it on a kid’s web site that is run by the House of Representatives. “A native or naturalized member of a state or nation who owes allegiance to its government and is entitled to its protection.” Right alongside the protection, which includes the assurance of the citizen’s rights, there is that often forgotten but crucial bit about the allegiance owed. Allegiance is scoffed at in some circles these days but the protection of rights is a two way street and the government can’t protect anything if it can’t count on allegiance.

Unlike Jefferson, most on the left do not believe in a God that "endows" men with rights, neither do they believe in the government that grants and protects them. They seem to believe that rights exist as inviolable, innate properties on their own. This, of course is absurd. Even a cursory look at any society that is not a western democracy will show that rights are only ephemeral and exist at the whim of the ruler. Without a Bill of Rights, a Constitution to give it detail and strong safeguards including an independent judiciary and controllable military a right is just an idea.


If Jefferson wrote The Declaration today he would find himself having to defend that original presumption in the media. This is because the mass media is in the grip of the liberal left and the left in turn is in the grip of a peculiar, post-Soviet nihilism that has become the prevalent dialogue style of the modern left. The left used to be predictably pedantic. They would lecture you about the coming worker’s utopia and excuse all the excesses of Russia, China and North Korea by telling you that the goal of paradise had to be won over the objections of the vestiges of the capitalist and religious power systems.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, and now with the slow capitalization of China, they can no longer point to the steady evolution of the utopia. To avoid admitting that their ideology is now officially not a candidate for “survival of the fittest” but rather a victim of “extinction of the least fit”, they have sunk into a kind of glib but effective, antic nihilism in which allows them to take advantage of their right of free speech to deconstruct and weaken the culture from within its vital institutions.

The glibness of the left is based on a kind of intellectual guerilla deconstructionism. They start with a patently false accusations and assertions and then, when challenged with information, fall back on a series of lines of defense consisting of reasonable-sounding requests for more information that are designed to eat away at the validity of the assumptions behind the information. A question that one of these might have thrown at Jefferson would be “So if you say the creator endowed us with these rights but later on you insist that there must be no official religion- how can you then use the deity to justify your claim to these rights?” This is an example of a question that is also really an accusation in disguise. Then, if you take the time and energy to argue with them, they just fade back behind more of those kinds of questions . When that last line of defense is breached they simply go back to the beginning and assert some other naive and obviously uninformed anti-western slogan thereby entrapping the unwary and sincere in an endless loop of fruitless talk.

Now, look back up at the joke I began this post with. If you substitute “intelligent citizen” for “missionary” and “modern leftist” for “cannibal” in the joke above, you have the idea.

The effect of this tactic is a “no lose” situation for the nihilist progressive because even while he understands that, if we know what we are talking about, he will be disproved on every point, he has put us on the defensive while engaging us and wasting our time in the futility of “educating the in-educable”. On the off chance that one of his insipid questions stumps us, he wins the whole table without really having risked anything.

Wikipedia says:

“Those writing sympathetically about deconstruction tend to use an "idiosyncratic" (sometimes in fact imitative) style with numerous neologisms, a bent toward playfulness and irony, and a massive amount of allusion across many corners of the Western canon."

If you consider that "idiosyncratic" can be taken to mean that the style is not just individual but actively counter to accepted styles of thought (usually, but not always known as wrong) and "massive amount of allusion across many corners of the Western canon" is a euphemistic way of saying "overly broad generalizations taken out of context" then this is pretty thin support from your sympathizers.

Wikipedia goes on to say:

"Critics assert that when one takes the time to deconstruct writings about deconstruction one discovers it was not worth the effort. Deconstructionism is ultimately and literally a meaningless philosophy. It is devoid of meaning and is, in fact, a direct attack on any possibility of meaning, because if the reader alone creates meaning there can be no truth; one person’s meaning is equal to another’s so there is no possibility of reasoned discourse leading to actionable conclusions. Deconstruction leads nowhere and means nothing.”

Deconstructionism, as practiced in the arguments of the left, is the intentional reduction of accepted values and ideals through spurious comparisons and arbitrary relativism. Such absurdities as the equation of the moral value of our culture and that of the Caliphate Islamists fall easily from their lips. While it is possible to argue every point that the deconstructionist makes down to the finest detail, it is impossible to make any progress doing so because every time you prove a point, the creative and agile deconstructionist asks another intentionally ignorant question that forces you to go back over the same ground. They don't care about the wasted time because they have nothing to gain the emptiness of their tatics mirror the emptiness of their philosophy. Without some self-evident truths, you wind up stuck defending that which should need no defense while the important work of extending the reach of rationality, liberty and true tolerance lies undefended.

A deconstruction stretches the rights of free inquiry and speech to illogical extreme. (It is possible to over-stretch a right because rights exist within systems and are thus responsible to the limitations of the system they operate within) Denying the power, moral authority and prerogative of the culture that grants that right, it places itself outside of the cultural framework.

At this time of challenge and danger, Western Civilization can ill-afford to be paralyzed by the internal rot that this deconstructionism. As I pointed out on a comment thread at Augean Stables:

This…, all reminds me of Yul Brynner. When I was a kid I remember seeing him on one of the old “talk shows”. I never had the patience for those shows- Merv Griffen, Dick Cavett etc.. My parents were watching and I was floating through the room and the raw charisma of Brynner held me for a little while. The host, whoever he was asked Brynner why he never seemed to get drawn into Hollywood squabbles. Brynner said that he had been given a bit of advice as a young man- (I wish I could remember who had told him this and the exact words) It went something like this: “Never fight with an idiot. When you fight with an idiot, he can’t rise to your level so you have to sink to his level. At his level he will beat you every time!”

We need to find a way to stop wasting our time and effort on the losers of history who have found new and inventive ways of insinuating themselves virus-like into our schools, academies and mainline religions. We also need to guard against doing this without adequate safeguards against losing the benefit that comes from hearing valid criticism that we find painful. The discrimination is not easy but the comment thread I cited above is a good example of they way in which way too much effort is spent by way too many good and sincere thinkers when they encounter just one of these losers who is determined to pervert the process. These discussions become the equivalent of intellectual IEDs that bleed the commitment and energy from honest efforts to understand and persuade. This is really what the left and al Qaeda have in common, they know that they have the weaker (that is to say, non-existent) hand on all rational matters so they just want to blow people up, render rational discussion impossible, hack off heads, frustrate the sincere engagement of ideas and spill blood randomly hoping to drive the intelligent opposition into disgusted retreat. Whether it is physical violence or the passive-aggressive deconstruction of discourse by the flood of words that negates ideas it is terrorism. They call this terrorism “Resistance”. When you see them use the word “Resistance”, they mean resisting the inexorable reality that they are wrong.

It would help if the media would realize that this is their game and stop promoting them to the unwary public. Every time Noam Chomsky is presented to the world as anything but a linguistic theorist whose writings are impenetrable, he becomes a leader of Resistance. When Ward Churchill’s lunatic ravings are published anywhere he becomes a magnet to the loser resistance, a terrorist of words. But, then, the Main Stream Media is rife with leftists and their liberal enablers who pay more attention to losers like Chomsky, Zawahiri, Guevara, Nasrallah and Churchill than to true heroes of progress like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Walid Shoebat, Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes.

The media, as I pointed out in my last post, also appoints obviously biased organizations like Amnesty International as the authority on Human Rights. If they understood rights and their provenance at all, they would realize that while Amnesty and their ilk focus their attention on trumped-up offenses and the occasional (mostly benign flaw) of Israel and the U.S., they are, by weakening the Wests moral authority, actively participating in the murder, torture and enslavement of millions who live under Islamic and other non-Western governments.

Here’s one last unfunny joke:

One day the civilized westerner was trying to explain why terrorism (with words and ideas) is bad. He says to the Resistor, “God created man to be but little lower than the angels. For that reason alone it is wrong to kill people either by blowing them up or by deconstructing their ideals.”

The Resistor thought for a moment and said, “Then why did he make them out of meat?”

The ReEducation of Legotown - or- What is the Difference Between the Western Left and the Caliphate Muslims?

I found myself in a Catholic Church again last Sunday morning. If you are surprised that someone who calls himself Yaacov Ben Moshe has been a relatively frequent visitor in Catholic Churches over the past ten years, you are not alone. I’m a little surprised myself. It is a family thing; my wife converted to Judaism with the head rabbi in Israel many years before I met her. She grew up Roman Catholic so half of our extended family is eastern European Jews and the other half Irish Catholic. There is also the odd self-professed Buddhist and a Protestant or two but of the last seven family funerals I have attended, three have been Jewish and four Catholic. This latest occasion was much happier though- we were there for the first holy communion of the daughter of a cousin.

The event took place at a beautiful old church in Boston- the Parish church that has been home to much of Mrs. Ben Moshe’s family for three generations. After the ceremony we adjourned to a restaurant across the street for a celebratory brunch. Mrs. Ben Moshe’s Parents are no longer with us but her father’s brother, the grandfather of the little girl whose communion we were there to honor was at the table along with his four daughters and one of his two sons (the other lives too far away) and their families. Following the custom of pseudonyms I have established for this blog and because he mentioned to me today that he would rather have been named James- after the saint on whose saint day he was born, I will call him James. James is a vibrant and statuesque ninety years old. I have always admired him and enjoyed his company. He is a lively and astute conversationalist He was raised during the great depression in a family that was economically deprived but far too strong, cultured and motivated ever to be called poor, he is solid and quintessentially American.

James is a devout man who respects the devotion of others. James and I enjoy talking about the things that matter to us and we have quite a bit in common. We understand the Bible, for instance, in very similar ways. He has always shown a sincere and respectful interest in Judaism and I have learned a lot about Catholicism (and life) from him. Almost every time we have had the opportunity, we have managed to share some of the most interesting, spiritual and intellectually intimate conversation I have ever known. One of the most spectacular of these occurred on the day that everyone who was available went to his house to help him pack and clear out the house in which he raised his kids. He was moving to a smaller place and was happy but nostalgic about the change. It was well into the evening when the work was done and we gathered in that living room jone last time. The women, his daughters and my wife were talking about their childhood memories as I sat next to James and we got into one of our deep talks- I don’t even remember how it started but soon he mentioned, offhandedly, that he was a soldier in the Patton’s 3rd Army during World War II. That got my attention- I’ve seen the movie at least five times. I questioned him and he kept on. He lived through many of the most critical battles of that war and at the end of it was present at the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. We had been sitting on the couch, talking while Mrs. YBM and three of James’ daughters were moving around and engaging in other conversation. Soon however, they were all gathered around listening to the story of his wartime experiences. Later, one of his daughters took me aside and told me, “Dad has never talked about any of that before with anyone. We’ve never really known what he did in the war…”

So there we were last Sunday- the Jews and Irish sat around the restaurant table trading stories and jokes and I thought briefly about my parents who had had a close group of friends and relatives of the same mixture back in the thirties before the war. They even had a nickname for their group they called themselves “The Hebes and the Hibernians”, I like the name. It is full of a very American brashness and disregard for old hatred and fears. It also expresses a kind of nostalgic mid twentieth century consciousness of differences without the stagnant, hypersensitivity of today. But aside from the fact that we are now too cosmopolitan and politically correct to think of ourselves that way, there was another big difference between then and now- the children.

There were three adopted children there last Sunday along with two biological ones. The eight-year-old girl who had her first communion had been adopted from China when she was an infant by her Irish-American parents. There were also my two youngest. I have six altogether but my four oldest are between 30 and 21 at this writing and too old and too occupied with lives of their own to have been there. The two youngest are the eight and nine year-old that Mrs. YBM and I adopted from Ukraine when they were 3 and 4 years-old respectively. For those of you who will whant to know, yes they are biological brothers. Then there were the two sons of two of James’ other daughters- one is fifteen and the other is twelve.

So, you have to picture it- here was this beautiful little girl who survived the perils of abortion, abandonment and infanticide in the land in which she was born and the two little boys who had come through the harrowing and tragic loss of their first family, a year of orphanage deprivation and the shock of cultural dislocation. The three play and talk happily and lovingly together. They also play with their sweetly tolerant older cousins. They help themselves from the steaming, silver-plate chaffing dishes and walk from one adult to another smiling, collecting hugs and making conversation.

Let me make it clear, my wife and I adopted our two youngest sons because we wanted two more children to raise with each other. It drives us both a little crazy when someone tells us how wonderful the think we are for having done it. “Wonderful” in that sense, had nothing to do with it. The same goes for our cousins who adopted the little girl. We are an American Family, and in America, the open-hearted, self-reliant adventurous side of you is freer and more empowered than any where else on earth.

You are also free to take another view. Leftists and guilt laden liberals think of us as an expression of a neo-colonial super power and accuse us of cultural imperialism. To them we are crossing cultural lines and doing the unforgivable, not respecting and preserving other cultures. An economist might look at American who adopt abroad and describe us as a net importer of children as compared with China, Ukraine and so many other countries who are net exporters. Both of these views miss the point entirely.

We are just plain people who struggle through day to day life, know how to have a good time, love children and have faith in the future- We get to raise these kids and love them because:
1. We can
2. We want to
3. We believe in the values we can impart to them as Americans, members of western civilization and Jews

There are, no doubt, a lot of well-meaning people on the left but the simple truth is that they are the in the thrall of a mistaken and destructive ideology. Its most destructive aspect, even worse than the blood baths of the Soviets, Maoists and Khmer Rouge is that they squander human talent and its potential to improve life. Ukraine and China are net exporters of children because of the economic and social conditions that exist there. Those conditions, in both cases, are a product of their Communist past. They cannot take care of the children they produce because the economy can’t support them and because the people are uneducated. Or, rather, they are educated to be cogs in the illusory collectivist world of communism that never did materialize in spite of all the terror and thievery that was committed to try to bring it about.

That terror lives still, in the hearts of those “cogs with no machines” and in the unregenerate leftist imbeciles in the west who have refused to learn the lessons of recent history. Stuck on the failed intellectual trick of imagining that human nature and culture can be changed to fit their superficially logical idea of how to make the world a better place, they just keep coming up with new ways to demonstrate that their ideas are worthless.

An interesting manifestation of this particular form of repetitive self-humiliation is their desire to enlist children in their lost cause. They keep trying to replicate themselves, but in an odd parasitic kind of way. They are mostly, too self-involved and narcissistic to have very many children of their own. Oh, some of them have kids, but often they are the childless by choice kind of people.

While folks like us do things like adopting two little boys when we are at an age when most people we know are beginning to shop for their retirement home, they make themselves busy with tying to mould young minds. Having eschewed what they sometimes call “bringing children into this screwed up world” they often become “educators”.

They do not, of course, become teachers like Kettering, who make it their first priority to know their students and help them to grow as individuals, but “educators” of the sort who in the seventies were of the opinion that sexism, aggression and many of the other ills of society were brought on by bringing boys and girls up differently. If boys played with dolls and not guns and girls played with trucks, they told us, all the differences between males and females would even out and not trouble us any longer.

Those humorless twits would never have called themselves Hebes or Hibernians they had problems enough with “Boy” or “Girl”. No, and they intimidated anyone who wanted to point out that children have their own character and that boys and girls are treated differently because they are different. Now that the generation that they attempted to raise that way has broken the all time records for murder, robbery and rape, we are on to another campaign to educate the personal freedom out of today’s youngster.

Here is a case in point:
The Hilltop Children's Center Bans Legos
The Hilltop Children's Center calls itself a child care program in Seattle, Washington. My understanding of Child Care is that it is “not school”, it is a safe, enriching environment where kids can be entertained and stimulated while waiting for their parents to finish work and pick them up. It turns out that Hillside is more like an experimental “ReEducation center” on the familiar communist model. One notorious episode in particular has hit the news media recently and is an instructive example of how the left endangers our future.

The (re)educators in charge have written an article explaining their actions. The article appeared in a periodical named Rethinking Schools. Just the name of the magazine gets my teeth on edge- it seems to imply that “What ever this school thing is that you old dolts thought up, it is wrong, the whole thing is a mess and we are just the group of bright young geniuses to set it all right- here we come watch us think!”

The story tells how the staff of a day care center fancied themselves to be educators and in the process of trying to prove it, banned one of the worlds most popular and least violent toys. Apparently it all started with a grand vision that a few children had conceived for building a place they called Lego town. It is notable that the only Lego Town builders that they mention are boys. The article begins with a dialogue between Carl and Oliver purported to be 8-year-old boys. Here’s a quote

"I'm making an airport and landing strip for my guy's house. He has his own airplane," said Oliver.
"That's not fair!" said Carl. "That takes too many cool pieces and leaves not enough for me."
"Well, I can let other people use the landing strip, if they have airplanes," said Oliver. "Then it's fair for me to use more cool pieces, because it's for public use."

Now, granted, I’m not a “ReEducator” but I have six kids including an eight-year-old and a nine-year-old and this sounds like a pretty stilted and politically pointed bowdlerization of eight-year-old talk to me. But, let’s read on…

A group of about eight children conceived and launched Legotown. Other children were eager to join the project, but as the city grew — and space and raw materials became more precious — the builders began excluding other children.
Oh my, it sounds like reality… are we “educators” going to find ways of helping the kids work through the shortages and conflicts? What do you want to bet the builders were all boys? If its one thing the left, especially the gynocratic left hates, it’s a boy with the imagination, initiative and enthusiasm to envision a big project and try to get it done- even if it means not including others with conflicting aims and visions.

Occasionally, Legotown leaders explicitly rebuffed children, telling them that they couldn't play.

Oh, the horror of it, a game that is taken so seriously that casual wanderers and dilettantes are actively discouraged by the enthusiasts.

Typically the exclusion was more subtle, growing from a climate in which Legotown was seen as the turf of particular kids. The other children didn't complain much about this; when asked about Legos, they'd often comment vaguely that they just weren't interested in playing with Legos anymore.

Hold on, maybe it really didn’t bother the other kids that much. Many kids don’t like Legos all that much. Maybe the Legos only seem so exciting when someone else is excited about them. Why were the other kids even being asked such leading questions about it? Clearly, only because it rankled the Commissars of ReEducation, I wonder why?

As they closed doors to other children, the Legotown builders turned their attention to complex negotiations among themselves about what sorts of structures to build, whether these ought to be primarily privately owned or collectively used, and how "cool pieces" would be distributed and protected. These negotiations gave rise to heated conflict and to insightful conversation. Into their coffee shops and houses, the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive. As we watched the children build, we became increasingly concerned.

Yes, well, of course you were concerned, dear, these boys were achieving something, they were committing themselves to creating something and they were acting on it with passion. Their achievement had, by its success created a hierarchy of sorts where builders and creators excelled. How very un-leftist, masculine and goal oriented of them! Oh, and by the way, did anybody notice that they just called America “unjust and oppressive”?

Thanks very much, your child care services will no longer be required- my children won’t be spending any time in your care, Ms Pelo and Ms Pelojoaquin.
After Legotown was “accidentally” destroyed under mysterious circumstances, a meeting of the educators’ presidium decreed that Legos would be banned. Yes, of course, that’s the perfect way to combat the eight-year-old oppressors, we take their favorite toys away from them and denigrate their achievements and aspirations.
They didn’t just take the toys away, though, they made a great moralistic show trial of it. Proving that it wasn’t, at all, about the children and their toys but about the educators’ feelings, great world issues, the educators’ political ideas and the educators’ fragile egos.

One teacher described her childhood experience of growing up without much money and her instinctive critical judgments about people who have wealth and financial ease. Another teacher shared her allegiance to the children who had been on the fringes of Legotown, wanting more resources but not sure how to get them without upsetting the power structure. We knew that our personal experiences and beliefs would shape our decision-making and planning for the children, and we wanted to be as aware as we could about them.

We also discussed our beliefs about our role as teachers in raising political issues with young children.

Hmm, yes, that’s important, raising political issues with eight-year-olds. What’s next, then, addressing the merits of vegetarianism with wild Bengal tigers?

We recognized that children are political beings, actively shaping their social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity — whether we interceded or not. We agreed that we want to take part in shaping the children's understandings from a perspective of social justice. So we decided to take the Legos out of the classroom.

How dare these kids have so many Legos to begin with? Yes, we’ll shape those spoiled little bastards and we’ll make the world safe for mediocrity and we’ll save on our own psychotherapy bills at the same time!

It goes on and on, I could continue in this vein but I think I’ve made my point. I want to draw a line under this point because it is critical to the preservation of western civilization. These people who are dedicated to warping our children are a parallel and exacerbating analog to Caliphate Islamists teaching their children to chant Death to America, Death to the Jews. The one weakens our ability to defend ourselves while the other whips up the enemy who would destroy us. How do we fall victim to the sappers in our midst? Why do they get away with their idiocy that seems so obvious?

I think the answer lies in the educators’ navel-gazing meditation on their own childhood hang-ups. It just makes you want to scream. Give me a break; it’s not about you, you self-absorbed losers. It’s about kids and their toys and helping them to become better realizations of who they are. Just because you are not able to let go of the angst of being a poor child or a social dud as a kid, you have no right to torture these kids and force them to ape your insipid version of social justice. You can, if you want, pretend that it is possible to create a world in which no one would be smarter, more popular, richer or better at something than anyone else if you want to but it is not true and you had better realize that you can’t force that kind of equality on anyone else. Get over it, get a life and join the celebration of freedom and creativity that is America. In the words of Pink Floyd:

“Hey, Teacher! Leave those kids alone!”

America is oppressive and unjust? Only the squalid corner of it where you lord it over powerless kids who deserve better than your cynical, intellectualized manipulations. Look at every failed communist and socialist society where people like you have tried to force everyone to believe in their version of social justice. What do you find? Losers and misfits like Stalin, Hitler, Arafat, Saddam and Pol Pot who had sad and brutal childhoods and were angry enough to make the world pay for it under the guise of economic and social equality. Yes its true, when nobody has anything, when the state is everything, then everybody is, in some sense, equal.

Look at the Caliphate Islamists with whom the left makes common cause, The only way to view this connection as anything but an absurdity is to see that these are two failed, repressive and ignorant culture/ideologies that are refusing to face reality and surrender. They have no choice but to support themselves and eachother by pretending that both are actually culturally superior to and spiritually closer to God than the freest, most successful culture in the history of earth. We, as the most compelling common enemy trump all of the inherent dissonances in their relationship.

One may well shrink back from the comparison. Some will ask "How can I equate these “well meaning” fools who espouse such benign ideals (as Dave, a commenter on my “Nancy and Hillary” post listed them: no torture or humiliation, no killing, human dignity, help the poor, etc) with the Caliphatists who wrap their children in explosives or send them out to throw rocks at tanks?"

While it is true that our leftist educators, are not advocating violence directly, they rationalize it, explain it and excuse it to the degree that one suspects that they would not wholly disapprove of the Ward Churchill formulation that justifies it. What made Churchill’s “Chickens Coming Home to Roost” formulation so incendiary is not just the sheer insensitivity and wrong-headedness of it but the fact that it was really just a logical extension of the perverse and mocking core of rage hidden beneath the left’s drab, sincere façade. If they seem to revel in Israel’s agony and rationalize the bloody wreckage of 9/11 it is because they derive satisfaction from it. When they protest for “evenhandedness” in the middle east, when they stand in front of Israeli bulldozers, when they march with CAIR in street demonstrations and, especially, when they try to neuter and denature our children (especially our boys) they are enabling, if not committing, murder. Passive aggression can be just as deadly as naked aggression.

Un fortunately, its not just obvious idiots like the educators at the Hillside Reeducation Camp that we have to watch out for. Here in Newton, Massachusetts for example, in our acclaimed elementary school I was shocked, two years ago, to get a notice asking that, in honor of a delegation of seven-year-olds (and their educators) from China, could our children please wear white shirts and red kerchiefs to school on the day of their visit. I was astounded at the moral blindness it took for such an idea to seem like a good one. To dress our children in what amounts to the uniform of the Communist Pioneer Youth is unthinkable. It is comparable to an American school of the late 1030’s asking kids to come to school wearing brown shirts and jack boots to welcome visitors from Hitler’s Germany. Needless to say, my sons did not wear white shirts that day. We didn’t bring those two boys here from the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine to allow them grow up in a country where dopey, morally tone deaf, leftist educators would encourage them to forget what they escaped from. These boys know more about the horror of the world than most American adults. I am surprised too that in the large Asian community here in Newton, some of whom are political exiles; there has not been an open revolt about the idea. It is as if America has become in the early years of this century, a modern isle of lotus eaters. We have forgotten our goals and our values and we are constant threat of something even more deadly- forgetting our enemies- forgetting that there is a beast that stalks us.

One final word, I used the word “loser” twice in this essay and want to emphasize that I meant it both times. America and western civilization is about winners. It is about guys like James who was born into a family that never had enough money. His father passed away when he was a small child. As a young man he fought against Hitler’s evil under Old Blood and Guts himself. Then, after a few years of happiness and peace his wife was incapacitated by early onset Alzheimer’s disease when their six kids were all between the ages of five and sixteen. He raised those kids, visited his wife in the “home” twice a day, feeding her her breakfast and her dinner tenderly, one spoonful at a time, and he worked nights to support them all. All that and he still has a quick and convivial wit, a broad grin, a firm handshake and a loving heart. He never once stopped to whine about social justice and he never needed to be lectured about it either. That kind of makes the bitter, whining “educators” at Hillside Reeducation and their friends the rage/humiliation addicted Caliphate Muslims look like losers, doesn’t it?