tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post265113605779200729..comments2024-03-17T11:05:22.464+00:00Comments on The Life And Opinions of Andrew Rilstone: FiveUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-76463112795694721162011-10-06T03:18:02.471+01:002011-10-06T03:18:02.471+01:00Nevertheless, Palin's rhetoric is often over-t...Nevertheless, Palin's rhetoric is often over-the-top. I don't think she ever called anyone the anti-Christ or an Islamist or a terrorist, but her "Real America" comment was ridiculous (what could be more American than New York City?) and the secret socialist/Communist thing, so often heard from her and her side, while probably no worse than the "tools of the rich" nonsense from the other side, is definitely the sort of thing our political discourse could do with less of.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-69296994022396969992011-10-05T16:02:13.673+01:002011-10-05T16:02:13.673+01:00Mr. Stevens: Exactly. Even if it were in any way e...Mr. Stevens: Exactly. Even if it were in any way established or even probable that Loughner's decision to "target" Giffords came after Palin's Facebook map (and it has not), 1) Loughner's mental state was so absolutely far gone that he might just as well have decoded similar "instructions" from his Alphabit soup, and 2) the FB map with crosshairs/surveyor's marks on *districts* (not people) was such a bit of mundane political imagery as to be utterly unremarkable. In fact one of the very left-wing web sites that first took the lead in using the map to blame Palin had itself employed a similar map previously-- in addition to a posting where a writer emphatically declared that Giffords was "DEAD to me!" for insufficiently supporting her party's leadership at some juncture. There is more of a case to be made in blaming Jodie Foster for John Hinckley than there is in blaming Palin for Loughner.<br /><br />In addition to the tragic deaths and injuries inflicted at the shooting itself, the aftermath is a very sad picture of one side of the American political establishment's shameless attempt to silence the other. If the Guardian is currently distorting its reporting of the event then I am disappointed, but not terribly surprised.Eric Spratlinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05946204367966268082noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-79499852492789326872011-10-05T13:03:18.751+01:002011-10-05T13:03:18.751+01:00@Sam Dodsworth;
Would certainly recommend Hennings...@Sam Dodsworth;<br />Would certainly recommend Henningson, too-very happy to be able to read him in the Danish.<br /><br />But of course, one can believe in Satanic Conspiracies without believing in a supernatural Accuser of Humanity (quite a few Satanic Ritual Abuseists, or the various pagan witch-hunters do not)-& vice versa.<br />Indeed, one recalls a public speech by a hypnotherapist in which he claimed that the elements of Satanic Ritual Abuse involving Space Aliens where "plants" made by the Satanic CIA Illuminati to discredit SRA supporters.I. Dallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03427385974208305067noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-25221054037187499172011-10-05T04:02:10.133+01:002011-10-05T04:02:10.133+01:00Eric: Much of the criticism of Palin is fair and j...Eric: Much of the criticism of Palin is fair and justified, in my opinion, though it is a dead certainty that Sarah Palin had no effect whatsoever on Jared Loughner, who had a pre-Palin grudge against Gabrielle Giffords (because she did not adequately answer his "What is government if words have no meaning?" question in 2007). Indeed, Loughner was probably opposed to Palin as well, since his views included that women should not be allowed to hold positions of power. <br /><br />The claim that pictures were printed of candidates with crosshairs over their faces is an outright lie, though, which rudimentary fact-checking would have revealed. I'm prepared to believe that the lack of fact-checking is The Guardian's fault and Mr. Rilstone simply innocently parroted it, assuming it was correct.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-50157803703251533902011-10-03T21:06:50.874+01:002011-10-03T21:06:50.874+01:00Most of the real dangerous heavy lifting of the Un...Most of the real dangerous heavy lifting of the Underground Railroad down South was done by blacks (both free and still enslaved). Whites were rarely doing any real high-risk work (though I have no doubt some were), particularly if they were in the North. E.g. after the Jerry Rescue in New York, when abolitionists broke into a jail and freed an escaped slave, 26 of them were prosecuted and only one convicted. Sympathetic juries refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. There are a few white abolitionist martyrs other than John Brown and Co., such as Elijah Lovejoy, but he didn't <i>expect</i> to be attacked by an angry mob. I consider white work on the Underground Railroad to be similar to the picketing, pamphleting, and lobbying, that goes on in the anti-abortion and anti-meat movements today.<br /><br />My main point is that because John Adams was friends with Thomas Jefferson is not good evidence that John Adams didn't really believe that slavery was wrong. We only decide that <i>all</i> of the concentration camp guards were irredeemably evil when society has come firmly and nearly unanimously down on the other side, such that we can no longer fathom how it is even possible to have believed the opposite.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-56130048048338147992011-10-03T19:36:13.901+01:002011-10-03T19:36:13.901+01:00"It will be remembered that that stupid Ameri..."It will be remembered that that stupid American lady who the Guardian is obsessed with described the attempt to link her Teapot movement with the 2011 shootings in Tuscon Arizona as "a blood libel". Because obviously, if you say that members of a particular party are Communists, Islamists, terrorist supporters, not real Americans and in extreme cases the AntiChrist, and print pictures of them with rifle cross hairs over their faces then there is no chance whatsoever that a nutter with a gun might take you a bit more literally than you intended him to."<br /><br />How unfortunate that this passage exists, in a post about the value of nuance and giving the other side a fair view.Eric Spratlinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05946204367966268082noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-34790812595911984142011-10-03T18:46:50.271+01:002011-10-03T18:46:50.271+01:00While I don't know how many abolitionists were...While I don't know how many abolitionists were active in the Old South- the Underground Railroad seems to have had plenty of staff- being a Free-Stater in Vermot, or a slave owner in Georgia, didn't mean confronting the other point of view on a regular basis. Daily Mail readers may work on the same basis- those things they would find objectionable are also the things which are filtered out by living in their neighbourhoods, reading their newspapers etc. There may also be a touch of Sam's outgroup about cultural conservatives: people can read the Mail for the sports or fashion pages and don't have to sign up to the full world-view that requires them to go shooting Cultural Marxists.Richard Worthhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09025201422909987658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-74220602351296930722011-10-03T18:28:11.177+01:002011-10-03T18:28:11.177+01:00For the avoidance of doubt: I don't think that...<i>For the avoidance of doubt: I don't think that there are institutions in this country which kill babies. And so far as I can see, neither do those people who a have a real, strong, moral, thought-out, principled objection to abortion (who you should be are very tolerant of, because there's a chance they might be right.) They certainly don't behave as if they think that every single person who works in the health service is on the same moral level as a concentration camp guard.</i><br /><br />I don't think this follows. You're assuming a level of moral courage which very few people possess. I'm going to use an American history example, for which I hope everyone will forgive me.<br /><br />In the early 19th century, there were a large number of committed abolitionists, mostly up north. Very few of them did much more than the anti-abortion and "meat-is-murder" crowds are doing now. In fact, one of the exceptions, John Brown, has gone down in history as a madman which, by the way, he was not. But it goes to show that the level of moral courage you expect the average man to possess, in fact, looks very much like madness to the average man.<br /><br />Brown really believed that black people were every bit as good as white people. This was exceptional, even among abolitionists (except of course for those who were of African descent themselves). The white abolitionists of the time, to a certain extent, couldn't help but think "What if I'm wrong?", surrounded as they were by a society which disagreed with them to varying extents, and most of them would have been horrified if a child of theirs wanted to marry a black ex-slave. John Brown would have given the marriage his blessing, but even Brown was originally radicalized, not by the holocaust which was being perpetrated on people of African descent, but by the murder of a white abolitionist by an opposition mob in Illinois. It was only after that that he started attending an African-American church in Springfield and came to fervently believe in the equality of the races.<br /><br />It is one thing to talk about how we would treat concentration camp guards, given the chance, when we live in a society with no concentration camps and where everybody in our society agrees with us about the moral status of concentration camp guards. It is quite different if we lived in a society where the majority agreed with the concentration camp guards and supported their work as a necessary function of a civilized society, even if they found it a bit distasteful and in which a great many of your family and friends (and maybe even you yourself) have personally delivered people up to the concentration camp, believing that they were doing the right thing, or at least not a wrong thing.<br /><br />I don't think it's very helpful to claim that the abolitionists of the early 19th century didn't really believe that slavery was wrong, simply because very few of them were willing to take actions which would have required enormous self-sacrifice and an astonishing amount of courage. I admire John Brown, but I am too self-aware not to admit that I do not have what it takes to have been John Brown.<br /><br />A vegetarian activist or an anti-abortion activist, given their own probable knowledge of their own lack of moral courage, are also probably disposed to forgive their family and friends for their lack of moral clarity.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-57230185284229488082011-10-03T12:00:58.811+01:002011-10-03T12:00:58.811+01:00I'm not going to second-guess your conclusions...I'm not going to second-guess your conclusions, but I do have a few things I'd like to contribute as possibly helpful to your argument. I've mentioned all of these before at various times, of course, but I think they all have particular relevance here...<br /><br />The first is Outgroup Homogeneity, which I think informs the Mail's views on "cultural Marxism". There's a short decription <a href="http://www.understandingprejudice.org/apa/english/page6.htm" rel="nofollow">here</a> but the abstract is that people who aren't like us tend to look scarily uniform. I think this is how a lot of not-quite-conspiracy theories come into being. There's a kind of cognitive dissonance that sets in between the assumption of uniform coordinated action and the obvious lack of an actual conspiracy - as with a homophobic friend of mine who agreed that there wasn't a literal written "gay agenda" but thought that something very like it arose from (effectively) flocking behaviour by Teh Gheys.<br /><br />The second, ironically enough, comes from a book about witch trials - Gustav Henningson's "The Witches' Advocate". Henningson suggests that witch panics arise from the intersection of folk beliefs ("don't cross Ugly Dave - he's got the Evil Eye") and the right (wrong?) theoretical framework ("Satan is real and recruits sorcerers to do his bidding"). The point to take away is that this pattern doesn't just apply to literal witch panics - Henningson makes an explicit parallel with Nazi anti-Semitism as an example.<br /><br />The third is Bob Altemeyer's "The Authoritarians", which is written in a style I find faintly irritating but is the best description of the patterns of thinking that inform the Daily Mail worldview. It's an actual book, but it's <a href="http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/" rel="nofollow">available as a free download</a>.Sam Dodsworthhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01534273379447820097noreply@blogger.com