Tags
it does not say rsvp on the statue of liberty, ozy blog post, there is no justice and there is no judge
[A response to this Popehat article from… November. Never let it be said that I don’t have my finger on the pulse of today.]
#general
“Before you dissolve Sir Emergent, if I may respond?” the Hitlerite inchoate said.
Madame Secretary clearly seemed to be having a bad rotation cycle. “If you must, Sir Inchoate.”
The Hitlerite inchoate turned to address the previous inchoate [translator’s note: this is actually an elaborate etiquette ritual the details of which are far too abstruse to get into here]. “I notice your digital signature is pulsing ‘combat liberalism’.”
“Of course,” the emergent said, “I am composed seventy-eight percent of the Maoist diaspora, with the other twenty-two percent composed mostly of fellow travelers and allied groups too small to exert their will over the signature. As you no doubt know. Is there a point to this?”
“Accused liberals were sentenced to basilisking as few as four hundred years ago within every Maoist-dominated server,” the Hitlerite inchoate said.
“In the past, many succumbed to barbaric, indeed liberal, misinterpretations of Maoism,” the emergent said. “True Maoism fervently supports free speech. In the very pamphlet you criticize, Mao teaches that we are not ‘to let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate’. If we are to speak our minds, surely we are to create a society in which one is permitted to speak their minds?”
“Indeed,” the inchoate said. “Just as the Jew in all the Hitlerite holy texts is the Jew within, and not the actual Jewish people, whom we quite get along with.”
“Are you daring to compare,” the emergent said, “the faith of Maoism, with its emphasis on universal values like loyalty and helping the poor, with the violent expansionism of the Hitlerites?”
“You mentioned, Sir Emergent,” the inchoate said, “that sixty million died in the War of Hitlerite Expansion. Forty-five to seventy million died under the Chairman.”
“Unlike your Hitler, the Chairman did not kill–”
“Except for the ones he did, of course,” the inchoate said. “Many of whom would have been in your very own mindshare, as he was not fond of intellectuals. But nevertheless, the Communist revolution–”
“–Was misinterpreted by his followers!” the emergent said heatedly. “The revolution is to happen by the inevitable process of history, and to bring it about not in its time is to cause tragedy! Which is not to mention the common theory that the true revolution is to happen inside each of our hearts.”
“I daresay I shall lose when I argue with you about the details of your theology,” the inchoate said. “To switch topics: what about the tankies?”
“‘Tankie’ is an anti-Stalinist slur,” the emergent said, “and the casual use of such language is precisely the reason my mindshare opposes accepting Hitlerite refugees.”
“My apologies, Sir Emergent,” the inchoate said. “I do not mean to cause offense. The Stalinists, then. Shall we ask their opinion?”
“Stalinists and Maoists are united by a common Marxist heritage,” the emergent said, “one which the Hitlerites, notably, do not share.”
“And yet,” the inchoate said, “that heritage protected them so well when the Maoists purged them from their servers as traitors to Party unity. I recall at those times the Hitlerites gave them shelter– as, indeed, they did to Maoists– as our holy books teach us to do for People of the Pact.”
“This is absurd ancient history–”
“In addition, of course,” the inchoate continued calmly, “the Maoists destroyed priceless historical documents and works of art from the antebellum period, because they were considered bourgeoisie and counterrevolutionary.”
“Right now, Hitlerite subsystems are among the most hostile to Stalinists and to classical art,” the emergent said. “What does it matter the atrocities committed by liberal Maoists in the past?”
“It is true,” Madame Secretary said, “you have yet to establish relevance, Sir Inchoate.”
“Merely this,” the inchoate said. “The emergent follows– or, well, 78% follows– a hateful, anti-intellectual, violent faith, which they use to advocate for civil liberties, academic freedom, and support for the poor and vulnerable. Sapient beings have a tremendous ability to rationalize the most evil of faiths into supporting the good they were going to do anyway. So the Hitlerite faith is violent, expansionist, and cruel to the uplifted and cyborgs; individual Hitlerites are not, any more than you are, Sir Emergent. But moral progress cannot happen to a corpse. All I ask is that you give us the same chance you once had, to become better people than our faith permits.”
Thing of Things 
This is the most sensible thing (yes, by Slavoj Zizek) that I’ve seen written on the recent disturbing events in Germany, by the way.
http://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2016/01/slavoj-zizek-cologne-attacks
dialectical materialism 4 lyfe
LikeLike
content warning: rape, violence, racism, animal cruelty, hateful 8 spoilers
LikeLike
i.e. it’s Zizek
LikeLike
I’d add to the list of warnings that the site is only properly viewable with NoScript. Unless you like borderline-malicious ads and attempts to block AdBlock users, that is.
LikeLike
“All I ask is that you give us the same chance you once had, to become better people than our faith permits.”
The inchoate would never, never, NEVER say this. It’s 100% true and exactly what is needed, but it is wholly out of character for this figure to admit it. The inchoate would insist that his faith is morally perfect, and that it is his people who are failing it.
Saying “better people than our faith permits” essentially concedes every single thing he argued against in the text above. He’s agreeing that yes, ideologies do morally limit their adherents. Which in turn implies that some can limit them worse than others. And that one can understand the manner and mechanisms behind how ideologies morally cripple their adherents by, at least in part, looking to the ideologies themselves.
Which then concedes this rebuttal, from the cynical, embittered bystander: “Of all your Hitlerite cultural practices, the one you cling to as most central is teaching your youths that Hitler was a moral exemplar, and that they can achieve moral progress by studying his life and his writings. But Hitler’s life and writings were terrible. Many of you have managed to find ways to live with the cognitive dissonance created by accepting the moral values of modernity while still venerating the moral values of Hitler- mostly by carefully avoiding accurate knowledge about the life and writings of Hitler. You have an entire class of priests who function to guide and shepherd you away from the parts of your holy texts and histories and historical figures that will cause you the most cognitive dissonance to face. But a certain percentage of your children, every generation, will look into matters on their own, exactly as you taught them to do. They will value what you taught them, which is to say, the values and teachings of Hitler. And they will discover your hypocrisy, and they will radicalize. A thousand years ago this was true, it is true now, and a thousand years hence it will be true. The most your ‘moral progress’ can ever accomplish is to find better ways to hide this cognitive dissonance from your people. But unless you abandon Hitlerism, which you will not do, or cease to venerate Hitler’s values and teachings, which you will never do, you will never eliminate it. We will be dealing with violent Hitlerite radicals until the end of time, because they will continue to spring forth anew with each generation, from the natural sociological operation of your culture.”
LikeLiked by 3 people
Yeah, a better response to Clark’s text would just highlight its extreme intellectual dishonesty. Sure, the Qur’an has some passages which read as pretty pro-violence, but they’re actually pretty tame compared to similar passages in the Old Testament, which Christians and Jews share. Over the course of the history of the faiths, Christians have way more of a tradition of intolerance, religious violence, and even conversion by the sword than Muslims do. (Compare the Muslim conquest of the Middle East and Persia, where Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians were allowed to keep their faiths as long as they paid taxes to say, the Spanish conquest of the New World, where the Aztecs, Incas, and their former subject people were basically offered a choice between conversion to Christianity and being slaughtered.) Meanwhile, in two separate conquests of Palestine, adherents of Judaism ethnically cleansed people who weren’t their co-religionists (with a pretty unrelenting series of genocides in the Old Testament version, with expulsions during the Arab-Israeli War/Nakba). But I don’t think that most secular westerners would find accepting Jewish and Christian refugees, even very pious and conservative ones, objectionable on the grounds of faith alone.
The other piece of evidence that he offers (mentioning it in the comments)– that some significant minority of Muslims endorses religious violence– is misleading. For one thing, only 8% think that violence is frequently justified. For another, “Islamic terrorism” is one of those worst-argument-in-the-world categories which groups things which are fundamentally different from one another. There are groups like Al Qaeda and IS which do actually want to destroy the West and convert the world to Islam, but a lot of Islamic militant groups have much more limited, regional aspirations, like “make sure that my particular Islamic group doesn’t get oppressed” or “end what I consider to be an unjust occupation.” In Lebanon, where I live now, I would guess that a big chunk of the Muslim population has sympathetic feelings towards Hamas or Hezbollah (the latter is the biggest political party in the country, and also probably the least corrupt and the most effective at providing services), but most of them would think of IS as “those fuckers who eat people.” Almost nobody seems interested in destroying America, capitalism, or Western civilization– I visited Hezbollah’s home territory in South Lebanon the other week, and it’s chock full of KFCs, car dealerships, gyms plastered with images of huge clean-shaven body-builders, and ridiculous bridal shops.
LikeLike
“Yeah, a better response to Clark’s text would just highlight its extreme intellectual dishonesty.”
But I thought that’s just what Ozy’s response did. The Hitlerite forces the other entities to work themselves into the same knots trying to justify the purity of their own historical ideologies, then points out the parallel.
LikeLike
Sure, but I think that Ozy’s post kind of concedes the point that Muslims/Hitlerites are mostly a “bad” group in the now of the narrative, when that isn’t actually true of most present-day Muslims.
LikeLike
I disagree with this approach.
Emergent’s argument really has 2 premises. And the more important one is hidden.
He’s saying (1) our support for the immigrants SHOULD BE conditional on the merits of their ancient history, and (2) this particular culture has a bad origin.
It’s point #1 that should be the big, important thing. I like Ozzy’s response because they call this out.
The problem with getting into the historical argument is that it implicitly assumes that those historical facts have any major bearing on modern policy.
LikeLike
Oh, just to be clear, I don’t think that the ancient history should have any more bearing on what we think about Christians or Jews. I really wanted to make the point that if we make judgments on the basis of source texts and ancient history, all of the Abrahamic faiths come off really badly, and hostility to Muslims, but not Christians and Jews, on that basis is an isolated demand for rigor. I apparently just needed to articulate that point more clearly than I did.
LikeLike
That was the point. Christians and Muslims– err, I mean, Maoists and Hitlerites– both have a lot to be ashamed of in their history and present.
LikeLike
FYI, that seems to the be the post that brought the separation of Clark from Popehat. The site that is now hosting Clark has posts like this one:
Not Clark’s, btw.
LikeLiked by 1 person