So, what is it that the Nation of Islam followers see in Islam anyway?

‘Al-Ghazali puts these words into the mouth of God: “These to bliss, and I care not; and these to the Fire, and I care not.” As disturbing as this expression of divine indifference may seem, it is clearly based on a supporting Hadith: “Abu Darda’ reported that the Holy Prophet said: Allah created Adam when He created him. Then He stroke his right shoulder and took out a white race as if they were seeds, and He stroke his left shoulder and took out a black race as if they were charcoals. Then He said to those who were on his right shoulder: Towards paradise and I don’t care. He said to those who were on his left shoulder: Towards Hell and I don’t care.”‘

Robert R. Reilly, THE CLOSING OF THE MUSLIM MIND, 2010, p 80.

Metaphysical justice would not appear to be part of the deal.

Ideas of the Enlightenment: Their Contemporary Relevance

The French Enlightenment & its Implications for Liberty - Professor Alan Charles Kors

Jurisprudential Legacy of the Enlightenment - Professor Suri Ratnapala

Lessons from the Scottish Enlightenment - Professor James R Otteson

Towards a New Enlightenment: Understanding Human Nature

After Freud: What do neuroscience advances tell us about human nature? - Provessor Peter Whybrow

Building Political Structures with the Crooked Timber of Humanity - Professor Denis Dutton

The Modular Account of Open and Closed Societies - Dr Laurence Fiddick

Reconciling The Traditional with the Modern in a Liberal Society

Reconciling Modernity with Tradition in a Liberal Society - Professor Chandran Kukathas

Reconciling the Traditional with the Modern - Dr Lindsey Te Ata o Tu MacDonald

Externalities: Beyond Coase, Williamson and Ostrom

The Problem of Social Cost: What Problem - Professor Harold Demsetz

Coase Rules OK - Professor Jeff Bennett

If Hayek and Coase were Environmentalists - Professor Terry Anderson

GFC: What have we learnt from the 2008-09 event? A Stocktake

Been There Done That - Professor Peter Boettke

After the Fall - Professor Deepak Lal

The Global Financial Crisis and the Efficient Market Hypothesis - Professor Ray Ball

Australia - A Generation of Economic Reform

A Generation of Reform - Professor Wolfgang Kasper

A Generation of Reform - Paul Kelly

New Threats to Liberty and the Private Sphere - Nannies and Busybodies,Tax Harmonisation and the Surveillance State

Surveillance State - John Kampfner

Tax Harmonisation: A Threat to Liberty - Professor Sinclair Davidson

Nannies and Busy Bodies - Dr Eric Crampton

New Developments in Economics: A Sceptical View

The Use of Happiness in Society - Dr Jason Potts

The Economist as Guru - Professor Geoffrey Brennan

Behavioral Economics, Law, and Liberty: The Never-ending Quest for the Third Way - Judge Douglas Ginsburg

Science, Scepticism and the Future 

Constructive Dissent - Professor Steven Schwartz

What Does Climategate Say About Science? - Professor Terence Kealey

Freedom vs Authority - What Path to Development? The Story of India and China

Paths Towards Development - Dr John Lee

The New World Order: Importance of China and India - Surjit S Bhalla

Washington Concensus - Professor Xiannon Xu

History, Culture and the Language of Liberty

The Language of Liberty - Professor James Allan

Individualism and its Contemporary Fate - Professor Kenneth Minogue

Calvin Coolidge and the Language of LIberalism - Amity Shlaes

Russell Kirk, “The Roots Of American Order,” pp. 187-189.

No question that the “enumeration of civil liberties in the Constitution” has “endangered” many civil rights belonging to many un-anticipated parties not specified in the Constitution.  Hence the ever-accelerating expansion of civil rights litigation.

And no question that “political power decree of positive laws without reference to general consent has led to the evasion, defiance, and diminished respect” for statutory law resulting in the “substitution of force for justice,” –another trend in law and enforcement that continues to accelerate.

These trends do not lead to more or better justice, equity or fairness.  They substitute the rule of men for the rule of law by shrinking the domain of liberty in human action, and eliminating opportunities for moral choices.  While it’s all done in the name of the “public good,” ironically, people who act without making a moral choice cannot be good.  Coercion and force nullify morality.  Morality requires free choice.  Without a moral choice, people cannot choose the good over the bad or evil.  The best they can do is obey–the moral stature of a “good doggy.”

Perhaps the left tolerates Islamic submission so well because they’re both systems of obedience.

Each day the news is full of reports of what people liberated from their moral responsibility have done to other people, to the world and to themselves.  People who do not experience morality are disconnected from justice or concern for mankind.  All the totalitarian systems - Marxism, Islam, Fascism, Socialism, Communism, Progressivism, Gaia, and their numerous combinations and derivatives - take us toward amorality in the name of their concepts of the public good.  All of them are self-defeating as they collaterally damage innocents and non-believers.  All of them institutionalize corruption.

Freedom, voluntary choice, limited government, judicial equity, all of these traditions preserve moral choice and enforce moral responsibility.  There will always be bad men and women.  Inflexible totalitarian systems do not contain self-correction mechanisms.  They insulate bad people and bad policies from their negative consequences.

Liberty is messy, but it’s still better than everything else because it allows us to evolve.  The left only want evolution they can control.  The right recognizes the fact that individuals know best how to direct their own evolution.

“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins–or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom–Lucifer.” Saul Alinsky

So reads the 3rd acknowledgment at the beginning of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals–a work inspired by the devil.

Now, maybe it’s just me, but, you know, when I’m casting about for an inspiration or something motivational, the devil just doesn’t come to mind.  I would have to suspend everything I know about evil, somehow wall that off in my mind, before I could look for something good about the devil to inspire me.  Maybe I’m lacking in a mental capacity that great thinkers possess.  Maybe Alinsky was a world-class sociopath who would stoop to any low to justify himself.

I am not a member of a monolithic “other” group of people who are not LGBT, who are not pro-Obama, who are not secular humanists, who are not haters of George Bush and Sarah Palin (or is it Sarah Palin and George Bush in the hierarchy of hates?), who are not anti-Christian, who are not pro-Palestinian, who are not anti-Jew, who are not believers in single-payer health care systems, who are not believers in global warming mythology, who are not Malthusian eco-doomsaying Luddites, and who are not militant in their political causes.

I and many others are not defined by what we are not.  Do you hear that Margaret Cho and all you jack-booted marching Leftists?  Just because you get off on organized militant communities of like-minded believers doesn’t mean the rest of us do!  You’ve got everyone neatly sorted out into your camps and their camps, and you couldn’t be more wrong about the rest of the people who you have judged to be not like you–people who you know precious little about–the people who you lump together as the “other” who you constantly fight, marginalize, minimize, demean, insult, ridicule and degrade.

Your insular moral code does not transcend the boundaries of your own interests.  Oh, it translates well enough inside your own movement, it just doesn’t work too well in the broader scheme of interests that all humans share for survival, thriving, fair play, opportunity, and peaceful coexistence.

The fact is you’re smart and this leaves us two possible explanations.  Either you know full well that your moral code doesn’t work for all of humanity and you press on anyway with conscious intent to subjugate all of us non-believers, or, you have an incredibly sophisticated form of brainwashing that affords you the delusion that your relative morality really is applicable to all of humanity.  Neither one offers much hope.

Throw the broad brushes away that you use to paint everyone you have judged to be not rainbow colored.  They are needlessly harmful and divisive.  If you want to get rid of hate in the world, stop hating people who are not like you.  Really.  Don’t pretend.  Don’t wear one face inside your movement and another one outside.  Stop pushing people away.  Stop creating enemies.

I know that your morality, your situational ethics, need an enemy to enervate your secular belief system.  I know that your basket of philosophies don’t stand on their constructive merits, that they only seem reasonable under emergency conditions that overwhelm the voices of cooler heads.  Still, you’ve got to start considering the rest of humanity beyond your own private interests.  We’re all getting too old for the Left’s dead-end histrionics.

The big totalitarians in history solved your moral dilemma by rubbing out the opposition by the hundreds of millions.  Unless you plan to follow their example, you’d better snap out of it.

[T]he moral destruction of communism was worse because the confusion between common morality and communist morality remains deep rooted.  With the latter hiding behind the former, it is parasitical and polluting, using common morality to spread its contagion.  Here is a recent example: in the discussions that followed the publication of The Black Book of Communism, an editorial writer at the French communist newspaper L’Humanite’ announced on television that 85 million deaths did not in any way tarnish the communist ideal.  They represented only a very unfortunate deviation.  After Auschwitz, he continued, one can no longer be a Nazi, but one can remain a communist after the Soviet camps.  This man, who spoke in good conscience, did not realize at all that he had just articulated his own most fatal condemnation.  He could not see that the communist idea had so perverted the principles of reality and morality that it could indeed outlive 85 million corpses, whereas the Nazi idea had succombed under its dead.  He thought he had spoken as a great and decent man, idealistic and uncompromising, without realizing that he had uttered a monstrosity.  Communism is more perverse than Nazism because it does not ask man consciously to take the moral step of the criminal, and because it uses the spirit of justice and goodness that abounds throughout the earth to spread evil over all the earth.  Each communist experience begins anew in innocence.

Alain Besancon, A Century of Horrors, 2007.

American leftists will ridicule their comparison to communists, however, in moral relativity, in masking harmful policies under good intentions, and in denial over their policies’ historical failures, leftists and communists are a distinction without a difference. (more…)

“Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, it makes the moral authority of whites and the legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative: that they are not racist.  The great power of white guilt comes from the fact that it functions by stigma, like racism itself.  Whites and American institutions are stigmatized as racist until they prove otherwise. . . . .[T]he larger reality is that white guilt leaves no room for moral choice; it does not depend on the goodwill or the genuine decency of people.”  Shelby Steele, White Guilt, 2006.

The moral authority that comes from an absence of moral choice is actually no moral authority.  This is a prescription for endless manipulation–by both blacks and whites–which Steele documents at length.  He also wrote, (more…)

Colorado Ranchers Pray for Death of ‘Death Tax’

Farmers also can use conservation easements. They donate land to a qualifying tax-exempt or governmental organization and agree to keep it as open space or use it for agriculture, said Durst.

Adding up all exemptions, Durst projects that less than 1 percent of farms will be subject to the estate tax in 2009.

It’s interesting how  Ron Durst, senior economist for the Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, and the Associated Press consider donating your land to the government to be a tax exemption.  Let me get this straight, if the government takes a portion of your wealth, that’s taxation, but if you give the government all of your wealth, then it’s a tax exemption. 

I guess so, but only because you’ll have nothing left to tax.

President Bush’s remarks about American moral authority

Remarks from President Bush’s last press conference, 1/12/09, responding to a question from a Washington Post reporter.

This excerpt hardly sounds like the apologia that the press characterized this press conference. The press, apparently still suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome will simply not permit positive views of Bush to go unchallenged. At some point in the next 4 years, people are going to start expecting the left to do something other than elevate themselves on the perceptions of others failures that they like to talk about. I’m sure everyone hopes they get it right, but their stampede toward socialism on the brink of a hyperinflation is a poor start.

“The average man of the present age [1948] has a metaphysic in the form of a conception known as “progress.” It is certainly to his credit that he does not wish to be a sentimentalist in his endeavors; he wants some measure for purposeful activity; he wants to feel that through the world some increasing purpose runs. And nothing is more common than to hear him discriminate people according to this metaphysic, his term for less worthy being “unprogressive.”  Richard M. Weaver

The operative metaphysic for many became the environment, which ought to be objectively measurable, but defies agreement.  Moreover, many of its’ adherents believe humanity and the environment are antithetical, that our existence necessarily harms the environment.

When God was the operative metaphysic, the majority of people incorporating God’s metaphysic would generally follow a benign course toward other people.  This was because people were made in God’s image.  Political decisions tended to favor the demographic majority.

Now that the majority accepts a metaphysic they believe to be opposed to mankind, and that same majority believes in growing and using the power of government, it follows that we should expect more political decisions to go against the interests of people.  On a fundamental level, this may help explain why we already have so many regulations and so much government action that is hostile to our well being.

In terms of stewardship, preservation, efficacy, sound economics, husbandry, accountability, oversight, and pretty much every other concept that engenders wisdom, government runs a distant second to all other forms of organized human action.  Who will protect the environment from the institutionalized, heavy handed, non-adaptive, one-size-fits-all, modus operandi of government?

Creative men and women will synthesize the protection of themselves with the protection of the environment, and they’ll have to overcome the negative effects of government and the ministrations of progressives to do it.

“That government is best which governs least.” Thomas Paine

“Every man participating in a culture has three levels of conscious reflection: his specific ideas about things, his general beliefs or convictions, and his metaphysical dream of the world.

“The first of these are the thoughts he employs in the activity of daily living; they direct his disposition of immediate matters and, so, constitute his wordliness. One can exist on this level alone for limited periods, though pure worldliness must eventually bring disharmony and conflict.

“Above this lies his body of beliefs, some of which may be heritages simply, but others of which he will have acquired in the ordinary course of his reflection. Even the simplest souls define a few rudimentary conceptions about the world, which they repeatedly apply as choices present themselves. These, too, however, rest on something more general.

“Surmounting all is an intuitive feeling about the immanent nature of reality, and this is the sanction to which both ideas and beliefs are ultimately referred for verification. Without the metaphysical dream it is impossible to think of men living together harmoniously over an extant of time. The dream carries with it an evaluation, which is the bond of spiritual community.”

Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 1948.

Merry Christmas

• The pseudo science of the climate change cartel.
• The pseudo statesmanship of the leftist democrats.
• The pseudo conservatism of republicans.
• The pseudo philosophy of moderates.
• The pseudo intellectualism of the modern university.
• The pseudo religion of fundamentalism — pick your brand.
• The pseudo market of the nationalized no-fault economy.
• The pseudo news from the main stream media.
• The pseudo democracy of the nanny state.
• The pseudo security of the welfare state.
• The pseudo healthcare of socialized medicine.
• The pseudo stewardship of government planners.
• The pseudo sanity of mental health.
• And the pseudo natural born citizen who became president.

People talk about tipping points.  I think Americans have reached a tipping point — one where the pretense of knowledge is piling up faster than factual and reasonable knowledge.  To be sure, the accretion of factual and reasonable knowledge has greatly accelerated with improvements in technology, but it just looks like the poseurs are winning the day in America.  If you read the Victor Davis Hanson piece in the previous entry, as Americans lose their understanding of the liberal arts, they lose their capacity to advance Western civilization.  The barbarians in Mumbai last week and the imams who filled their heads with jihadi mush, acted on this weakness as Americans celebrated Thanksgiving with one eye on the TV.  The slippery slope of cultural coarsening accelerated (again) as terrorists (again) reduced Western civilization to bloody chunks of body parts and (again) shifted our concept of normalcy toward a state of random violence.  The causal thread running through and linking all of this — terrorism, the abrogation of history, the politicizing of all human endeavors — is enabled by disconnection and the interruption of reality feedback.  These conditions are necessary precedents if you want people to stop thinking and acting in the interest of their own survival, and they work especially well for the growing segment of the population unburdened by a conscience.  All that’s required of us is tolerance, and acceptance that the bounds of what must be tolerated continually expand toward the unthinkable, the horrible, the terrible, and whatever new fad the polity wants to try on for size.  Ideals, outcomes, objective measures, standards, fixed points for evaluation, better and worse, good and evil, laws, constitutions, all of these concepts must give way to tolerance.  God forbid we become narrow minded.

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.”  H.L. Mencken (more…)

“Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”

From:

Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address

In the Washington, D.C.

Wednesday, March 4, 1801

FITNA part 1
FITNA part 2

- and -

Pat Condell’s excellent commentary The Religion of Fear

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The Trouble is the West

“The Western mind-set—that if we respect them, they’re going to respect us, that if we indulge and appease and condone and so on, the problem will go away—is delusional. The problem is not going to go away. Confront it [Islam], or it’s only going to get bigger.”  

Ayaan Hirsi Ali