And then they came for the Christians and the white people
I just finished a post about an anti-Semitic cartoon published in the international NY Times. But the left certainly isn’t stopping at anti-Semitism; Jews are just the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. You no doubt have noticed that Christians and white people (especially white men) have been fair game for quite some time, too.
But it’s getting worse. Or you might say it’s getting more open, in that coal mine known as modern-day academia.
First let me give a little background on this story. Tim Wise has (please see *NOTE below) has the following resume as an anti-racism (that is, pro-diversity) educator, activist, and speaker:
Since 1995, he has given speeches at over 600 college campuses across the U.S. He has trained teachers, corporate employees, non-profit organizations and law enforcement officers in methods for addressing and dismantling racism in their institutions.
So Wise has been instrumental in shaping—or trying to shape—the minds of both students and adults, in a diverse (to coin a phrase) group of settings. These sorts of trainings are very popular and have been for quite some time, with the alleged goal of fostering tolerance and understanding and acceptance of diverse opinions, races, colors, lifestyles, sexes/genders, and creeds.
But Wise draws the limits at Christians and white people, for whom he has the harshest of words. Here’s a Facebook post of his from September of 2015, which I will now proceed to render in full:
This is America…people basing their beliefs on the fable of Noah and Ark, or their interpretation of Sodom and Gomorrah…rather than science or logic…If you are basing your morality on a fairy tale written thousands of years ago, you deserve to be locked up…detained for your utter inability to deal with reality…NO, we are not obligated to indulge your irrationality in the name of your religious freedom…but we will provide you a very comfortable room, against which walls you may hurl yourself hourly if your choose. Knock yourself out….seriously, knock yourself out, completely, for weeks at a time…I’m sorta kidding but not by much…I don’t believe lunatics like this should be locked up, but I do think they have to be politically destroyed, utterly rendered helpless to the cause of pluralism and democracy …the world is not theirs. They have no right to impose their bullshit on others. They can either change, or shut the hell up, or practice their special brand of crazy in their homes…or go away. Their choice. And this argument applies to any fundamentalist religionist of any faith who thinks they have a right to impose their beliefs on a secular, pluralistic society. Go away.
Now, I’m all for the separation of church and state, as are the vast vast majority of Christians in the US, as well as Jews and even ultra-Orthodox Jews. In fact, as far as I know, most of the countries these days that are theocracies are Muslim ones (although just now I did a quick search of Wise’s work, so far I haven’t found mention of that, although I suppose I might have missed something).
Wise recently was the keynote speaker at Harvard’s annual diversity conference. He apparently kept his anti-Christian views quiet during his speech, but aired some of his other views [emphasis mine]:
President Donald Trump is and “always was” racist, Wise said. His election shows that “this country is more sexist and more racist than I realized.”…
Wise sought to clear up purported misconceptions about educating people on equity, inclusion and solidarity. It is “not about shaming people, it’s asking [them] to be responsible, responsive and accountable” for their advantages, Wise said…
Higher education has actually been too successful in this regard, prompting white people to “hoard” their privileges upon realizing they exist, Wise said. In other words, white people are inclined to “internalize superiority.”
Academic institutions have an obligation to embrace the struggle for social justice and solidarity, “not just at the level of rhetoric but policy” as well, Wise said.
“Schools must make mission statements up to date,” and be “willing to say what it means to operationalize” the implementation of inclusive ideals.
He set out vague admission and graduation requirements in order to achieve this mission. Admissions offices must consider applicants under the mind-set that “if you’re not down with this mission, then you don’t actually fit in with us as an institution.”
Current students should pay their dues by proving that they’re committed to “this mission” by way of “community service requirements … relevant to solidarity.” If they don’t meet this standard, “then you don’t graduate,” he advocated.
There’s plenty more at the article if you follow the link, but I think you get the idea.
It’s an old idea. Leftism has long had two major characteristics (among others): leftist movements tend to be rabidly anti-religion as well as deeply desirous of total control over people’s lives and thoughts. These two things are not unrelated, because in a sense the left wants to replace religiousness with its own brand of fundamentalism.
Whether these twin elements combine to lead to actual mass imprisonment and murder when leftists come to power or whether their emphasis is on “re-education” and discrimination without so much actual murder, or whether both are equally favored, leftists want to get the job done. And freedom of speech, thought, and religion are just small casualties along the path to the Utopia they plan (with themselves in charge, of course).
The fact that this man was the keynote speaker at a Harvard conference supposedly on tolerance and understanding is both ironic and completely unsurprising, as Orwell could have told you. The left is very very dangerous, and the Gramscian marchers are entering the stadium for what they believe will be the final push.
*NOTE: On the Spectator thread, there was a commenter pointing out that Wise is Jewish. First of all, even if he were Jewish, that says nothing about the fact that his views are not at all common among Jews and are absolutely not sanctioned by Judaism in any way shape or form.
But Wise is not Jewish in any sense of the word as I understand it. If you look at his heritage, he has three non-Jewish grandparents and one Jewish one. The Jewish one was his paternal grandparent, and Judaism is not transferred through the paternal line. Not even the vile Nazis, who were very intent on learning who was Jewish and who was not, would have considered Wise Jewish. Under their reprehensible Nuremberg laws Wise would have been a “mixed race (second degree)” and approved for Reich citizenship.
According to Wikipedia, Wise himself has apparently “referred to himself as Jewish and as an anti-Zionist Jew but does not practice Judaism.” I can’t quite parse that, but I will add that whether or not he himself says he’s Jewish, the combination of his non-Jewish ethnicity (one paternal grandparent who is Jewish) as well as his belief system (doesn’t practice Judaism) wouldn’t make him any sort of Jew with which I’m familiar, not even a secular one.
I’m not a Chicken Little type of person, doom and gloom, etc. But — I see nothing but worsening social conditions from here on until this hate burns it out. My intuition tells me that things are going to get far worse before things turn for the better.
I hope I’m wrong.
You had better hope that Trump wins reelection. If a democrat takes the White House in 2020 our freedoms are toast, and anybody who supports views as conservative as those Bill Clinton held during his presidency will be hounded out of academia and their employment threatened. Antifa, the black shirts of the left, will be reinvigorated and crosses will be drawn on the store fronts of any Christian business owner.
Yes, it CAN happen here.
“but we will provide you a very comfortable room, against which walls you may hurl yourself hourly if your choose. ”
Try it buddy. Molon Labe. Death to Tyrants.
And I’ve got more than words at my disposal and some government training that was useful for once.
“Higher education has actually been too successful in this regard, prompting white people to “hoard” their privileges upon realizing they exist, Wise said. In other words, white people are inclined to “internalize superiority.””
Yep. No WASP has ever done an honest day’s work or competed in an area of life that demands striving for doing one’s best on a daily basis – like say, a doctor, fireman, airline pilot, SEAL, or many other endeavors that are meritocracies. I’m fed up with this crap. I worked my a** off to be the best I could be and never asked for any special consideration because of the color of my skin. As did the non-Caucasian pilots I knew and worked with over 38 years. We didn’t care about the color of a person’s skin. The only thing that counted was: “Can he/she hack it?”
Mr. Wise isn’t wise at all. He’s read a lot of books full of nonsense. When we stop caring about excellence and striving for excellence, that’s when we become like Venezuela and other Socialist paradises. People need to stand up to his SJW BS.
J.J. +1
A very freighting world we are entering into. The topics this post and the previous one allude too leave a very bad taste in my mouth.
Instapundit just reminded everyone that even if Trump wins in 2020, a Dem will eventually be elected again. And that person will make todays Dems look like Soopy Sales.
LYNN HARGROVE:
And I was putting up this post as you were writing that comment.
Wise is a person who has no expertise in any endeavour. His entire career is a fake-it-til-you-make-it enterprise. Those responsible are the people who book him, some of whom are idiots and some of whom employ him to make their own lunacies look more reasonable.
Now find me a faculty member who has ever pointed out it’s all humbug.
He’s read a lot of books full of nonsense.
No more than anyone else who holds a BA from a satisfactory institution. He has no research degree. He has no formal training at all in any branch of sociology or psychology.
If the Wiki entry on him isn’t fiction, neither his mother nor his maternal side grandmother were Jewish.
“It is “not about shaming people, it’s asking [them] to be responsible, responsive and accountable” for their advantages”, Wise said
Subtext; to be ‘responsive’ you must agree with his POV. To be ‘responsible’ you must be willing to give what you have worked for to those who have done nothing to earn what you’ve worked for and, to be ‘accountable’ is to admit that you don’t deserve what you have because it was acquired ‘unjustly’ through your very existence.
There’s no reasoning with the fanatical. And their fanaticism will force you to either surrender or put them out of their misery. For the Wises of the world are as rabid dogs. As they would imprison and then condone the murder of all those who disagree with them.
“Instapundit just reminded everyone that even if Trump wins in 2020, a Dem will eventually be elected again. And that person will make todays Dems look like Soopy Sales.” LYNN HARGROVE
Oh yes and that is why it will come down to “politics by ‘other’ means”. As the Left will allow no other resolution of our conflict in philosophies. Given that they cannot achieve their utopia without total compliance in thought, speech and behavior.
Yet, should they achieve the power to implement their agenda, when it collapses into utter madness, they will deny it to their graves, just as with Maduro and the Castros.
By definition, fanatics cannot admit to having been completely wrong and being responsible for untold misery and death. Proven by the utter silence on the Left regarding the 100 MILLION dead at their leadership’s hands in the 20th century.
Secular fanaticism stalks the world on every continent.
When people accept each other as equals even if they don’t agree on certain points they can engage in discourse and fuss, verbally fight and even enjoy the debate no matter what the topic. When they consider those who think differently as being beneath them, mentally deficient, un-educated, and dangerous because they differ then those, in the know of proper thoughts people, they shift those with un-proper thoughts into ‘Untermenschen’, sub humans, not worthy of existence and that frightens me.
Mr. Wise has a new post up about this — https://medium.com/@timjwise/anatomy-of-a-smear-677d1091d72
So far, it’s got only two comments and they take issue with what he says. He must not have a lot of supporters.
Mr. Wise from the College Fix:
The antiracist educator credited his own career success to his “white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, cisgender privilege and age privilege.”
Reading his bio at Wikipedia, he certainly can’t credit it to his intelligence.
Couple of comments from that post:
“As a scientist/engineer with 4 degrees from top schools (PhD, UCLA, Howard Hughes Doctoral Fellow), it is against my religion to bother listening to intellectually inferior numb-nuts with a BA in poli sci such as (mis-named) Wise who make a living participating in diversity panels. Having lived in a crappy trailer for 8 years with a father who was either unemployed or disabled, I don’t need liberal preaching about privilege from someone who has depended on engendering guilt feelings to make a living. He should try an honorable job, such as collecting trash. Cheers from flyover country.”
“PhD in Finance here.
Read Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft. Those who work with their hands do not need to submit to annual performance reviews and fill out TPS Reports with the new cover sheet. Either the table is level, the toilet flushes, the lights turn on when one flips the switch, the garbage can by the curb is empty… or it isn’t. Objective reality is the sole standard of value for those who work with their hands.”
“It’s too bad that enraged Christians shut down his speech with chants and insults, and that campus police had to escort him from the premises. Oh, wait, that didn’t happen.”
From Mr. Wise’s “reply” to the College Fix:
Wow, does that methodology sound familiar!
This post by Wise should be enshrined in journalism / blogger textbooks as a classic archetype of the non-apology, of the genre “you’re wrong because you didn’t really understand what I meant, even though what I said was perfectly clear and you did actually get it right, BUT whatabout this stuff by your guys and anyway I was bullied in my youth.”
He hits almost all of the benchmarks; a fisking would be almost redundant.
He does not really quite refute the Fix article, which could have been easily done by posting a transcript of his speech and pointing out any misquotes, but depends mostly on pulling in extraneous material and “yeah but” remarks, including showing his long tweet (as quoted by Neo) and claiming that the whole thing wasn’t shown by the Fix (despite the clear “read more” link) and then trying to dismiss it as just trolling click-bait by himself, and he didn’t really mean “locked up locked up” — you can judge for yourself what he did mean, and it isn’t funny.
I was not impressed by the reply, but no doubt his fan club will accept it all as gospel.
Is it just me or are there more people like him who live without producing a good or service than they used to be?
my bosses boss is harvard, the other is yale
euthanasia is a goodness for me in their world view
among other things
belgium gives a place to go i guess…
invest in ovens..
the train has no brakes…
and its got stamps of approval from similar…
Via According to Hoyt today, this post hits a lot of the same points at Neo’s.
https://caffeinatedthoughts.com/2019/04/marx-attacks?fbclid=IwAR0z8Dx-maU5z1w_AyhnlAcrEzpc8iD2jcX8h1IN6aF5Y1Qp2GAps7chOK4
“Every outcome is equalized through force. The state is greater than the individual, and until the revolution is complete, people will be treated and judged according to their class, not as stand-alone human beings created in the image of God.If you are white, you are privileged, and you are damned in the name of social justice. Whether you enjoy any personal “privilege” or not, and whether you are personally racist or not, you are guilty, privileged, and racist anyway–period. None of the details about who you are as a person matter. The only thing that matters is that you belong to the white “class” and therefore you are a target.
This is the essence of left-wing ideology in our society. It has achieved the lofty status of a militant social cult. It has already destroyed Europe, and we are next in line. The invasion has already begun.
The most tragic aspect of all this is that gullible Christians, especially the millennial variety, have been brainwashed into the new Marxist ideology and are busy helping the left do the dirty work of destabilizing American society.”
“They have no right to impose their bullshit on others. ” – Mr. Wise.
Proof that the Left is still living in the 1950s.
No one is any longer IMPOSING Christian practices or principles on anyone (if they ever did in living memory), just like no one is imposing racism or sexism or homophobia or Islamophobia — if they were, Jussie Smollett would not have had to make things up.
Brandon Straka makes that point somewhere in this video, I don’t remember where now, but the whole thing is worth listening to (and I hate listening; would rather read transcripts, but haven’t found one yet).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rJB6OmKMvw
Tying all of today’s stories together in this comment thread.
(caveat: it’s only the first day; information about the shooter may change)
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/04/27/synagogue-shooting-poway-california-last-day-of-passover/
[not really talking about the perp or victims at the synagogue, though]
* * *
[quite a few more comments about the non-apology]
[maybe he hates all religions equally..just like Mr. Wise]
TestWhy would any group with pretensions to reputability, or even mere aspirations thereto, give this POS (going by the quoted facebook posting) a platform?
SHAME on Harvard.
The Left knows it is losing. The five stages of grief are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. Most of the Left is still in Denial. It looks like some are entering Anger.
Moral has nothing to do with science or logic, its origins are completely irrational. Without religion there could be no moral of any kind, for good or for worse. If a man does not understand such elementary things, he is a damn fool and ignoramus.
AesopFan: Mr. Wise does not hates all religions equally, it is worse than that. He hates equally everybody who does not agree with him on anything. Leftism is now a religion of the sorts, utterly intolerant and aggressive.
Jewish Revolutionary Spirit on display, Aisle 7.
Not Logos.
Looking for information about the NYT cartoonist and the editors who approved the cartoon for publication. Any help would be appreciated.
And THIS is why they cannot be allowed to take away guns.
As Kurt Schlicter likes to remind, “They hate you and want you dead,”
Wise seems a contender for Least Aptly Named Person Ever.
The people who belittle religion say that nothing should be sacred, but what they really mean is that they should decide what is sacred, and you should just accept it.
That is why every “rational” attempt at an atheist paradise always begins with identity politics. Kulaks must be identified and made an example of, because that is how you establish yourself as the arbiter of who gets to believe what.
“I can’t quite parse that”
I can. He wants to get intersectional street cred for being part of a minority group, while simultaneously proclaiming his atheism.
the weak always talk toughest
Sergey,
“Moral has nothing to do with science or logic, its origins are completely irrational. Without religion there could be no moral of any kind, for good or for worse. If a man does not understand such elementary things, he is a damn fool and ignoramus.”
Since I disagree, I guess I’m a fool and ignoramus. Without logical coherency, morality is capricious and that is irrational. Science is of value in regard to morality when it provides evidence disproving prior moral dogma such as forbidding intermarriage.
Nor are religion’s origins completely irrational. There is nothing irrational about the Ten Commandments, nothing irrational about Christ’s assertions. There is nothing irrational about the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths nor his Eight-Fold Path. Nothing irrational about the Bahai religion’s 10 precepts.
Different religions proclaim at least somewhat different definitions of morality. Which is why our Constitution forbids the establishment of any religion. Yet, the Founding Fathers were wise enough to understand that “inalienable rights” can only exist if they have been granted by a creator whose existence transcends the transitory consensus of mankind’s opinion.
As for “there could be no moral of any kind, for good or for worse.”
The life of Marcus Aurelius is demonstrable proof that personal morality is not dependent upon religion.
And he wants to replace it with a religion that believes in a reward of 72 doe eyed, large bosomed sex slaves as a reward for murder? Great, where do I go to get in line for extermination.
I always take a look, whenever possible, at the background of atheist writers and speakers who denounce religion as a fairy tale. Very frequently they have no background in the sciences. My background is in natural sciences, math, and engineering and it is precisely that background that has lead me over the years to a firm belief in the existence of God. Anyone who believes that our universe was created ex nihilo by some sort of accident and that life on Earth came about by the right chemicals coming together in the primordial ooze is showing complete scientific ignorance. The finest minds atheism can muster have not been able to come up with a plausible explanation for the appearance of life on Earth from purely natural processes and most don’t even talk about it anymore.
Ann on April 27, 2019 at 8:09 pm “So far, it’s got only two comments and they take issue with what he says. He must not have a lot of supporters.”
He had enough supporters to get hired at a couple universities, though, and speaks frequently at colleges and universities (www.timwise.org/about) which shows that there are plenty of “moderate thoughtful liberals” who are eager to pay him to spew his evil ideas.
From Wikipedia: “Wise has referred to himself as Jewish[6] and as an anti-Zionist Jew[21] but does not practice Judaism.”
This my shocked face.
The vast majority of parents have no idea of the level of toxic poison their kids are subjected to at nearly all universities. This kind of shit goes on all the time and you’d better fall in line or you’re persecuted and ostracized.
All that and more for just $50k per year! Where do my kids sign up?
College for a lot of people is more about re-education than actual education. Parents are the last line of defense against all this, and often the only line of defense.
There is a reason that totalitarianism and communism/socialism are synonymous. Also the talkers resent the success of the doers in this world who actually render a service or produce goods for their fellow humans.
“Will no one rid us of this troublesome beast?”
I was interested to see if my former employer ever invited him. They did not, but a student group did. I suspect a great many of the invitations he receives are from ethnic particularists in the student body and from the departments and programs which house the exemplars of the patronage-for-favored-political-interests policies at said institutions. Jerk talking to jerks.
The vast majority of parents have no idea of the level of toxic poison their kids are subjected to at nearly all universities.
The vast majority of parents want their children to have a credential. A subset want their children to have salable skills. The rest is of no interest to them or they have neither the tools nor the talent to argue back.
I always take a look, whenever possible, at the background of atheist writers and speakers who denounce religion as a fairy tale. Very frequently they have no background in the sciences.
The questions at hand are much more philosophical than scientific. I suspect understanding why someone adheres to one view or another is more a matter of sociology or social psychology.
If my own experience working around professors is any guide, religious questions don’t animate them. Some are churchgoers, most not. The rudest atheist on that campus wasn’t distinguished by his philosophical meditations, but by bad social skills (which got him fired. Not denied tenure. Fired). Him aside, the most rudely opinionated man you’d meet there was in fact a philosophy professor. He wasn’t accomplished as a philosopher (dissertation unfinished, 3 papers published over the first 3d of his career, none thereafter). He wasn’t notable for sublime wisdom. As a human being, he was an a**hole. However, he’d been there so long he’d achieved the status of ‘institution’, and people were cordial to him even though they found him an ambulatory root-canal.
Clean Willie on April 28, 2019 at 9:18 am at 9:18 am said:
… The finest minds atheism can muster have not been able to come up with a plausible explanation for the appearance of life on Earth from purely natural processes and most don’t even talk about it anymore.
* * *
Reminds me of a joke. There are lots of variations online, but this one is representative.
How about Naftaly Frenkel, architect of the Gulag? Matvei Berman? Genrikh Yagoda? Lazar Kaganovich? Are they Jewish?
Anti semitism laws were among the first passed by the Bolsheviks after they seized power. Does this make them a good regime, despite their brutal persecution of the Orthodox Church?
“My background is in natural sciences, math, and engineering and it is precisely that background that has lead me over the years to a firm belief in the existence of God. Anyone who believes that our universe was created ex nihilo by some sort of accident and that life on Earth came about by the right chemicals coming together in the primordial ooze is showing complete scientific ignorance.” Clean Willie
I find this persuasive:
“Are they Jewish?” By ethnicity – yes, by religion – absolutely not. They all were Bolsheviks, militant anti-theists, and they persecuted Jewish religion no less brutally than Christianity. But in Russian Empire antisemitism was endemic and often zoological, which made for Bolsheviks essential to uproot it, since Bolsheviks needed ethnic Jews as specialists in many fields. Jews were the most educated and learned people in the country in desperate need for technical specialists after most of educated Russians fled to emigration.
“Atheism and It’s Scientific Pretensions” David Berlinski
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyxUwaq00Rc
Uncommon Knowledge from the Hoover Institute
Yeah, this person is not Jewish in any meaningful way.
My sense of things is that Jewish identity suffers from an ambiguity: The mere word “Jewish” fails to distinguish adequately between:
Group 1: Persons who practice some version of Judaism which is sufficiently conservative/orthodox that it could still be recognized and respected as Judaism by a triumvirate of Hillel, Akiva, and Maimonides;
Group 2: Persons who practice some liberal flavor of “Reform” Judaism in which all the hard sayings and supernatural elements are ignored or contradicted, and any observance or belief which eludes the grasp of their intellects or is sufficiently distasteful or inconvenient to their habits is simply ignored;
Group 3: Persons who are blood descendants (maternally plus 75%+ of his grandparents) of the Israelites from the not-lost tribes who, after the Babylonian Exile, were repatriated into Judea under Cyrus;
Group 4: A functional-atheist from group 3 who can’t pronounce a single prayer in Hebrew and has a bacon cheeseburger for lunch on Passover but calls himself Jewish because he likes bagels and Woody Allen films and can’t imagine himself submitting to any moral dicta other than the one against denying the Holocaust; and,
Group 5: Just like group 4 except that he’s a declared atheist (rather than merely a functional one) and he actively preaches ideologies which are antithetical to Judaism with a perverse kind of evangelical zeal. (Mr. Wise — oh, the irony of that name! — falls in this category.)
I’d love it if some respectable rabbis would provide us goyim with an official glossary of terms distinguishing between the above five groups, so that we could use terms accurately and correct anyone who dishonestly glosses over the distinctions.
Indeed, if the rabbis are taking suggestions, allow me to recommend succinct labels for their consideration:
Group 1: Faithful Jews
Group 2: Vacuous Jews
Group 3: Biological Jews
Group 4: Putzes
Group 5: Nazi Wannabees
But those are just suggestions from a a friendly goy, and I’ll defer to the rabbis if they have better ideas.
ESergey, your claim that the Bolsheviks persecuted the Jewish religion with the same brutality as they did Orthodoxy is simply untrue. So is your claim that “most educated Russians” fled.
Anti Semitism “zoological” in Russia? What lever do you mean by that? So the Bolsheviks were doing the work of the Sirit of History be “destroying” it? You are praising, I take it, the work of the commissars and killers I named earlier?
The history of Russian-Jewish relations is a bit more complex than the accepted “fiddler on the roof” narrative. Too bad asking questions is forbidden.
Kirillov:
We’ve had discussions before on this blog about the claim that there were a lot of Jews among the Bolsheviks. There certainly were some people of Jewish origin among them (we can argue about whether we should even call them “Jews” when many were themselves atheists and anti-Judaism and anti-religious, but that’s a different discussion although a relevant one).
From Wiki in their very interesting entry on what’s called “Jewish Bolshevism“:
In addition, there is also this:
Eddie:
Yeah, but you don’t get street cred for being Jewish. Jews may be a very tiny minority, but they are not considered a favored minority group on the left. They are just white men to the left. To the neo-Nazis, of course, they are brown men.
If I have not misunderstood what he has said, then think that Sergey’s terse remark is likely to be misunderstood at a glance.
It is an assertion derived (I assume) from a teleological assumption, somewhat parallel to the proposition which would grant that yes, there are logical deductions regarding ordinate and necessary human laws and limits which one can make from human nature; but in order to root those inferred conclusions more firmly, once one steps outside (if one legitimately can) the human frame of reference, then one must refer to a metaphysically rooted conditioning which flows down to and through, human nature. Something then beyond nature which makes nature, and specifically man’s nature something more than “just another developmental phenomenon”.
Now, whether the conceptual move to the free-floating atheist’s-eye view, is a logically or methodologically legitimate move, likely to produce better deductions concerning moral principles, than the metaphysical view (and some will think of C.S.Lewis and the Tao here) is another question.
But I figure what Sergey proximately means is as per Dostoevsky that “Without God, all things are permissible”.
Aristotle, and Zeno, and Aurelius find a way to root morality in an accepted view of normal human development.
The challenge comes when some shrug and either equate human development with nothing more than insect development, or the way water flows downhill, as supposedly equally cosmically meaningless; or further claim that reality itself is – ultimately – pointless.
And that is pretty much where popularizers of modern science have placed their bets and proclaimed their message.
Of course when they say it’s not objectively wrong in any ultimate sense to kill; they don’t mean it’s Ok to kill them, of course. No, they certainly would not want you to conclude that.
Paul from Decatur:
See this as well as this and this.
Paul from Decatur:
Also please see this.
I learned about Wise a few years ago. His concerns were strange; I thought he was trolling. Now I conclude he needs some serious therapy and probably a good slap in the face. Neo, is your license still valid? Do you take individuals or just couples?
A Facebook comment underneath his rant: “Right wing, white Christian hegemony, an old and ugly story.” So would a left wing, non-white, non-Christian hegemony be a new and pretty story?
Kirillov on April 28, 2019 at 1:23 pm at 1:23 pm said: “To bad asking questions is forbidden.”
And, yet, here you are, asking questions. Is this not a puzzlement? Got any other persecution fantasies you want to express?
Of course ethnic Russians have no personal interest at all in denying that Russian communists were, in fact, Russian communists, none at all. If Jews were overrepresented in this or that revolutionary group, one must concentrate on that, not on the majority of Bolsheviks who were ethnic Russians. Likewise, ethnic Russian Jew-haters have no personal interest in denying the existence of historic Russian Jew-hatred, none at all.
“when the October revolution came, the Jewish workers had remained totally passive … and a large part of them were even against the revolution. The revolution did not reach the Jewish street.” – head of the NKVD’s Jewish Section.
Here’s a talk Wise did years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4mVaLvpsXs. From the comments on the video there’s much support for his “cause” – educating white folks about their privilege. As one comment states he’s an “educator.”
Jeoffrey, the topic actually requires whole treatises not just a short comment, so I omitted a lot. Of course, logic is necessary for any moral reasoning, just as for any legal reasoning, but the point was that it never is enough. And I accept of course that some individuals can be righteous without adhering to any specific religion, but I was speaking not about individuals, but about societies, and in history there were no non-religious societies. And when societies were losing their religion, as happened with Greeks and Romans in late antiquity, a general moral decline and social disintegration followed. Irrational does not mean weird or silly, but just something that can not be obtained by rational way from direct observation, and the foundations of any moral system are axioms, not theorems, and are given by revelation (like 10 Commandments).
GRA:
Strange thing–I once had a professor (clinical, teaching about how to do therapy) who said he once kicked a client and the client said it helped him. I got into an argument with the professor (as was my tendency) and said it was a wrong thing to do. No one in the class agreed with me. This was years before my political change experience.
“Aristotle, and Zeno, and Aurelius find a way to root morality in an accepted view of normal human development.” It did not prevent their societies from decline and degeneration, and this accepted view of normal human development must already exist and be sound enough. Also, this Greek moral did not look any bit acceptable for the Jews, and they were fighting it with fervor and zeal in Maccabeys wars, in Judean war with Romans and again in Bar Kohba revolt. Christianity took a position much more like Jewish one rather than Greek one, so we are speaking now about Judeo-Christian moral, not about moral of Zeno or Aristotel.
Perhaps the shock brought the client out of himself for a moment. But you know, it probably should not be done … unless the therapist has a medical degree. LOL
Imagine walking up behind a subjective idealist and whacking him hard across the backside with a baseball bat.
“Who, me? Oh … no, YOU MUST HAVE IMAGINED THAT!”
Besides therapy, I’d honestly like to have Wise and Thomas Sowell have a debate, or a “talk.” Wise’s talking points about aren’t new – he admits this, that they are used by black activists, but he sure does believe that America is indeed a racist country with a soul that needs a good cleansing.
“White people just don’t get it.” Well, the same can be turned around to PoC and say PoC don’t “get white people.” If you don’t agree that there is white privilege then you’re ignorant and in denial. Again, a tired and often used accusation from the left.
It has also been my observation that Wise has never been formally challenged. When people do challenge him he tends to write that “they have no friggen argument” and calls them words that this own mother would be ashamed of. He has very little time for people who do not think his way.
Sergey: “when societies were losing their religion, as happened with Greeks and Romans in late antiquity, a general moral decline and social disintegration followed.”
Secularists love to talk about how religion is bad because of the wars there have been over religion. But in the 20th century we had two ideologies that scorned religion (Communism and Nazism) and the result was not only untold misery but probably over 100 million people killed. It may be that the religious wars were in spite of religion, not because of it.
Besides therapy, I’d honestly like to have Wise and Thomas Sowell have a debate, or a “talk.”
Sowell has produced an engaging body of work at every level of respectable discourse – scholarly treatises, syntheses, trade books, newspaper columns. Into old age, he was ever producing observations in his topical commentary which caused you to say, “damn, why didn’t I notice that?”. Unless Wise is indescribably stupid, he would never cross swords with Sowell in a public forum. Again, Wise knows nothing. He sells his medicine show to other people who know nothing.
@ Art: I can picture Sowell looking at Wise strangely, eyeing him up and down, and saying straight out he’s a race hustler to which Wise’s head will explodes (even some lefty white folks admit Wise is hotheaded and does not take criticism well).
Wise’s twitter bio says he’s been fighting neo-Nazis since ’89. Sure you have, bud. I honestly do not know what he’s done to lessen any supposed institutionalized racism he “knows” is present. He just goes on circuit to tell whites that, yes, they have white privilege and “these are the ways you can acknowledge it.” The thing is Wise didn’t create his fanbase: as it was already pointed out he feeds on academia administration and workplaces who want to be “woke.” It’s built in. He does relies on loose facts & evidence and his narratives are outlandish.
Communists and Nazi always fight each other everywhere, but they are also imitating each other and are in many things like twin brothers. Both are enemies of freedom and civilization as we know it and despise moral and religion, first of all Jewish and Christian religions, while impostering themselves as agents of reason and science. But they can not do any real science and destroy it by attempting to bend it for their political and ideological agenda.
These may be culturally revealing comments. Not for what they say, but for what they implicitly bypass.
Though I do not know Sergey, I assume he is Russian, and was educated without some of the informing assumptions that once, if more infrequently nowadays, constituted part of the western natural law tradition.
And it was a tradition which took the writings of the men I mentioned, and others such as Cicero and Seneca, and using certain formulations of the kind mentioned by the Apostle Paul, baptized, so to speak, some of the moral law insights of the greater of the late pagans.
Thus, Aristotle is read with a different perspective by a Roman Catholic or Anglican who is familiar with Aquinas, than by, a Greek Orthodox – and here I am thinking of Edward Feser’s exchanges with the Orthodox theologian David Hart Bentley.
It is there and in disputes between fideism [faith without conditioning reason] and voluntarism [roughly the good being merely what God sovereignly wills apart from a presumption that his intrinsic goodness conditions any such willing] on the one hand, and the larger western natural law tradition [excluding Calvinism] which sees intelligibility and reason [as essential to the experience of truth] , as at least in principle, as part of any definition of “good”, on the other. The latter then, implying a kind of the convertibility of being and good, which encompasses the transcendentals as well.
I don’t think that this way of reasoning about morals and ethical systems is accepted everywhere. It was famously rejected by Christian nominalists, who can be seen as protestant precursors, as well.
But it makes a big difference in how you analyze right and wrong.
DNW:
For what it’s worth, the therapist was a man and his client was a man.
“It is “not about shaming people, it’s asking [them] to be responsible, responsive and accountable” for their advantages.”
In practice, it IS all about shaming people, or even worse, like the socialist re-education camps. Notice that it talks about “advantages”, which is identity, rather than behavior, which one uses reason (or not) to choose.
And the biggest advantage, the biggest privilege of virtually all Americans is — being American. Which is a choice. But I see very very few of these super-privileged Americans choosing to be something else.
Strange, and sad, that this stupidity is leading so many kids to be unhappy at being boys or girls, and having so many want to change to the other.
Diversity is a color judgment which includes racism, sexism, genderism, etc. Diversity judges people by the “color of their skin”.
Also, “separation of church and state”. Not mosque and state, temple and state, synagogue and state, or the quasi-secular chamber, perhaps den, and state. A thinly veiled contempt for Christians.
The State-established quasi-religion in America is Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, politically congruent (“=”), and prone to conflation of logical domains (e.g. theories of origin, prophecies of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming). In Stork They Trust.
Jews are another color in the diversity spectrum. They are regarded as colorful clump of cells with privilege. Whether it’s Nazis, communists, fascists, liberals, or progressives, their faith (e.g. Stork, conflation of logical domains), quasi-religion (e.g. Pro-Choice), and traditions are congruent and convergent. #HateLovesAbortion
Thank you for clarifying Wise’s heritage. I always considered him a shonde for the goyim, but it looks like he’s part of the goyim himself, and I guess still a shonde.
GRA on April 28, 2019 at 2:45 pm at 2:45 pm said:
…
A Facebook comment underneath his rant: “Right wing, white Christian hegemony, an old and ugly story.” So would a left wing, non-white, non-Christian hegemony be a new and pretty story?
* * *
That’s certainly what the Left claims, and always has.
It is, perhaps, the visible discrepancy between that claim and observable reality that is partially driving the #WalkAway and #Blexit movements, among others.
DNW: The Western natural law tradition is relatively new, formed about 17 century, and acceptance by Aquinas of Aristotelean logic does not mean that he accepted Antique Greek moral. The same happened in Jewish theology much earlier: Maimonides in 12 century accepted Aristotelian logic, and it became an integral part of all Talmudic reasoning, but he completely rejected the moral teaching of Greek philosophy. Yes, Eastern Orthodox Churches still follow more Augustine rather than Aquinas, unlike almost all denominations of Western Christianity, but the difference between pagan moral of Antiquity and Judeo-Christian moral dwarfs these relatively small differences between Eastern and Western Christianity and even between Christianity and Judaism.
It seems important to me to call all movements of Progressivism of either Nazi or Marxist variety, as well environmentalism in all its forms, what they actually are: Neo-Paganism, a revolt against all traditional Western religions of the last two thousand years.
Sergey,
I’m not exactly sure that what you are arguing directly corresponds to what I was arguing. Which in my case was that the Western Christian tradition included some elements in which certain doctrines and insights of greater of the pagans, were “baptized” so to speak and incorporated into the development of the Catholic natural law tradition.
And although the Church before the high middle ages may not have had the complete Aristotelian corpus, it had more than the Prior and Posterior Analytics and more than is often appreciated; as well as writings of various realist pagan philosophers such as Cicero: Not, just Neo-Platonics, and Augustinians.
Please recall that Albertus Magnus, flourit 1240-80 was the older mentor of Aquinas and even outlived him. Thus, when you say that the tradition began in the 17th century (the 1600s) you are either thinking of the late scholastics such as the Spanish jurists, or else of Locke, et al. You may be thinking of “natural rights” which are sometimes claimed as being a late development out of the natural law tradition; though the claims of personal and common rights are implicit in the older, and especially the medieval tradition, as well.
Please see the following.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-law-ethics/
Revisiting this story, because a post linked by Gerard on Sunday is so descriptive of the way Wise operates.
Host: (plus lots of other fun things)
http://americandigest.org/wp/true-but-forbidden-21-mini-drones-and-desperate-leftoids/
Post: (commentary on a speech)
https://blog.jim.com/politics/michael-knowles-at-ukmc/
Speech by Knowles:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/zWYliHNTXiw?start=2920
Indeed. As I person of faith, I long ago realized that as America has sought to throw off the shackles of perceived religious oppression, its secularization has really been nothing more than a transfer of faith. I unavoidably found myself in a situation where I had to watch the Democratic National Convention of 2016 and was struck by how much it resembled a church service. Khizr Khan gave a testimonial, Paul Simon led the song service and Van Jones offered a fiery sermon “She knows,” was his repeated emotional mantra referring to Hillary. Politics and Science are the new religion of our age, and they are far more self-deceptive than any faith in an almighty. Decrying fairy tales, Mr. Wise. Time to take a look in the mirror.
Such wide definition of natural law theory actually places it in the context of the great scholastic dispute about reality of universal categories, that is defines it as realism as opposed to nominalism as applied to moral categories. Only moral relativism (non-existence of moral truth) and nihilism are left behind. But the real question here is not the existence of moral truth, but human ability to know it from experience and logical reasoning. Here we see Luther with his famous “Here I stand and can not do otherwise” which explicitly denies any logical argumentation, and Calvin with his deep skepticism about goodness of human nature. Kant believed in universal moral law, but the ability to acknowledge it in his view was hinged on good will of an individual to accept what is good for society as well. A very high bar to overcome, and different people could have very different ideas what is good for society as a whole. The ideas on these matters of Nazis or Communists also look rather appealing to many. Do we really need mountains of corpses to prove them wrong? So his “categorical imperative” was actually quite subjective, not an undeniable truth to which all reasonable human beings must be coerced by a logical reasoning.
In short, horrible history of 20 century has dashed these overly optimistic hopes of humanists, moral universalists and natural law theorists. Humans are not reasonable and could revolt even against logic and reason, when they find them too oppressive for realization of their passionate wishes. We see this today in such comic everyday displays as people denying even their obvious biological sex or racial identity. This puts under grave suspicion universality of moral. Can it be that different tribes were intended by Creator for different roles in human history and were given different moral codes to follow? Why Jews are vilified now for rejecting human right absolutism and subordinating these rights to the needs of collective well-being and national survival? Are the moral universalists the new totalitarians, denying individual tribes their own, subjective view on what is good and what is wrong, to which they are actually entitled?
Many of the sources on Russian Bolshevism and anti semitism are biased and inaccurate.
The best I have found is still:
https://tarbaby.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/
The farther away our observation point gets from the event, the more distortion occurs. Thus it is important to get primary sources and primary witnesses that were still alive during the event to tell us what really happened.
Humans will still have biases but it is several orders better than your fake news main sewer media.
Geoffrey Britain on April 28, 2019 at 11:49 am at 11:49 am said:
It is nice that academics and scientists with white lab coats are able to admit how wrong the “giants” of the past were. They still have a mountain load of work to Unify Physics with gravity, and classical physics with quantum physics. Eventually they are just gonna have to admit they were wrong on the theory of gravity.
Much resistance is still in the Old Guard, as seen even here.
Sergey on April 30, 2019 at 5:12 am at 5:12 am said:
…But the real question here is not the existence of moral truth, but human ability to know it from experience and logical reasoning….Humans are not reasonable and could revolt even against logic and reason, when they find them too oppressive for realization of their passionate wishes….
* * *
Excellent points.
I would submit that “experience” includes the metaphysical as well as the physical. However, emotional and spiritual insights (which are not the same thing) should not ever contradict observable reality (provided we recognize that we cannot observe or explain everything that is real), only augment and enlighten our understanding of it.
YMMV
Sergey continued: “Can it be that different tribes were intended by Creator for different roles in human history and were given different moral codes to follow? …Are the moral universalists the new totalitarians, denying individual tribes their own, subjective view on what is good and what is wrong, to which they are actually entitled?”
* * *
Very possibly so, with the caveat that all the Creator-given moral codes expressed the same fundamental ethics and responsibilities in the beginning (prohibitions against murder, theft, adultery, etc; caring for family; community duties, etc.) and were corrupted through the centuries of human manipulation.
Most differences in morality systems are in the category of “practices” rather than of “principles,” but some former and some now extant religious and philosophical systems (which I distinguish by “deity driven” or “human driven”) have corrupted even the basic principles.
As to the second proposition, it has become blatantly obvious that the woke “tribes,” while loudly proclaiming their tolerance of diversity and the value of subjective morality, only welcome those “tribes” which differ from their own prescripts in minor “practices,” if that.
That is the essence of totalitarianism; their goal is always to obtain the power to transform “welcome” into “permit”.
Sergey on April 30, 2019 at 5:12 am at 5:12 am said:
For my money, Sergey, ‘the question (or problem) of universals’ is the prime philosophical question. For it involves all attempts to engage in logical reasoning, gives rise to epistemology (in my opinion), and some form of assumed solution preconditions all intersubjectively meaningful attempts at discourse, which view utterances as involving more than conditioned behavior.
– Agree that most flavors of Protestantism were or are somewhat fideist, and that is probably why we wind up with the more intellectual versions of it as a kind of religious impulse tinged existentialism.
– Agree on Kant. Or at least I am of the opinion that either he believes something so profound and mysterious that I cannot grasp its meaning, or that he is engaging in a form of circular reasoning.
– Well, it’s a nice idea; but first you have to assume a creator, not just a biological teleology in common as a category maker, and then you have to assume a real shared identity in some respect.
KInd of reminds me of Wittgenstein’s [who knew nothing of genetics and the potential essentialism implied there] notion of a ‘family resemblance’, which people will insist is a great insight and must be basically regarded as a heuristic device which only the dull minded literalist will object to. But a concept with regard to which the dullard will stubbornly insist that the very notion of a meaningful family resemblance is in the first instance based on a real biological phenomenon which shapes the paradigm. One having real boundaries and meanings, and therefore a discernable definition; and one which cannot just be construed as a series of infinite partial overlaps which might end up extending ad infinitum, to … cardboard boxes and axle grease, and balls of twine.
It’s kind of like one of those games where you are to pick say, three out of five items forming a natural category, and are shown a blue colored numeral, a blue vase, a blueberry, a red raspberry, and an apple.
First they came for the vaccine safety activists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=138&v=Fil_fsdL4ZA
Aesop,
So you too occasionally dip into James A. Donald’s website. I “met” him online 15 years ago or more — we were both active in the Individual-Sovereignty Yahoo group at the time (he pretty much disappeared from there a decade or more ago). At the time he posted good stuff. And IMO, “James’s Liberty Index” is still excellent. For one thing, he has Sophal Ear on the realities of the Cambodian killing fields — the ones the execrable Chomsky kept saying were a fiction made up by disgruntled refugees:
The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979:
https://jim.com/canon.htm
James’s Liberty File Index
https://jim.com
James’s Liberty Web
https://jim.com/world.html
I still look in on his weblog from time to time, but he’s moved away from libertarianism and into an area that’s downright deranged on the subject of the Distaff Side, having gone through a Dark Enlightenment phase (“Mencius Moldbug, ” a.k.a. Curtis Yarvin, and like that).
I assume you know all that. I’m curious though — how did you come across him? It occurs to me that possibly you know him personally, both of you being software types and possibly relative contemporaries?
I hadn’t seen the posting on Michael Knowles.
Thanks for the various links. :>)
Julie – I actually do not know who James A. Donald is, having just followed Gerard’s link, but he sounds interesting.
I will look into your links also.
Aesop,
The site blog.jim.com is James A. Donald’s website (from your posting above:
Post: (commentary on a speech)
https://blog.jim.com/politics/michael-knowles-at-ukmc/ )
James has gone bigtime into the “keep the woman in her place and out of trouble” thicket. He may strike you as too offensive to mess with. Which is why I only sneak a peek once in awhile.
But he did one piece called “Altar, Throne, and Freehold” that I thought was interesting. IIRC, it’s his theory that those are the three legs required for a proper society. But I won’t swear to it.
Thanks – just about anyone who is worth reading on topic A can still be head-shaking-crazy on topic B.
😀