A President in Black and White

Barack Hussein Obama is President of the American Republic.

And here are his parents.

The first mixed-race president.

As for his performance, we shall see.
Few of his policies and attitudes
appeal to me.

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Even Dolly Lamar finally gets it

Apparently the Dalai Lama, the cool and groovy Pope-replacement for the spiritual Left, has woken up to the fact that Muslim terrorism can't be addressed by ahimsa, harmlessness.

Wow. Dude. Musta taken a long retreat in the Himalayas to get you to that one.

Maybe the history of Buddhism's disappearance in northern India, where it arose, brought back some memories of what the jihad can do.

And apparently he stunned his audience by declaring that he loved George Bush even though he disagreed with some of his policies.

So.

Here's a bunch of highminded folks all ready to meet Islamic thugs with non-violent compassion,
but the fact that their icon feels affection for George Bush stuns them.

There you have it. "Spiritual but not religious" in a nutshell.

It has been a regular experience of mine that people of that sort are very good at loving classes and masses but not so good with actual individual people.

Or reality.

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Why I'm bothered

I am reading John Keke's new book, The Art of Politics. Kekes is that rare bird, an areligious conservative.

His political philosophy tries to base itself on reason and experience. His fundamental stance is anti-ideological. By ideology he means the privileging of a single value by which political decisions are to be made, regardless of circumstance, and the consequent rationalizing program to organize society. So both the Libertarian stance of making liberty the dominant value and the Communist stance of making equality the dominant value are rejected. To put it in my own demotic way, since the world is messy and people are messy, simple answers in politics make for an even worse mess.

I remember when I was first migrating away from my liberalism around the turn of the century (!), I took on a libertarian stance, but rejected the Libertarian Party as soon as I saw its self-description as "The Party of Principle." I like Jonah Goldberg's wry comment: "As you know, I consider Libertarians to be like Celtic barbarians deployed by British kings in the Middle Ages against the Scots or the French. They are extremely useful for fighting your enemies, but you would never want one to actually sit on the throne." Pretty funny!

Some of Kekes' writing, though clear, is painstakingly careful and abstract, in the way that you expect from philosophers, but which is not always pleasant to read. Oddly, though he is no friend of natural law theory --to him, another ideology-- I often find him sounding like Aquinas. At least in his dialectical mode of argumentation and the careful, step-by-step way in which he proceeds to build up his case.

And a recent review by a religious conservative used exactly the same phrase, "hollow at the core" to reject his work as did a typical liberal professor some years ago. Both find him insufficiently ideological.

It has been his work that has made it clearer to me how a utopian and collectivist egalitarianism lies at the heart of the contemporary left, one which has no ground in either planetary or human nature and which can only be imposed by massive coercion. Its spirit is full of that postmodern contradiction which Stephen Hicks outlined, a militant cultural relativism combined with a highminded absolutist moralism. Puritanical nihilists, the will-to-power disguised as empathy.

He also is very clear and unapologetic in valuing the political order of America as one of the great achievements of mankind. Not because it is perfect but precisely because it has taken into account the inherent imperfection of the world and of human nature and has provided such a wealth of goods of all kinds for us who have the fortune to live in it. For all its ideals, the American Revolution was a conservative and limited one, built on compromise, unlike its high-flying French cousin, from whom all the revolutionary evils of the West has since taken descent.

And the incoming President is the darling precisely of the pomo liberals, those contemporary Copperheads, who have done their level best to supplant the traditional American and messy and imperfect way of proceeding with their own seven-pillared fantasy vision of a better world. Australian John Ray puts in well: "It's the shared hatred of the rest of us that unites Islamists and the Left. American liberals don't love America. They despise it. All they love is their own fantasy of what America could become. They are false patriots."

This is the intellectual background, the proximate context, this morning (!), of "why I'm bothered". The immediate point is discovering that the Muslim woman whom Barak Hussein Obama has invited to take part in his post-inaugural prayer service is president of an organization named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a case involving support of Hamas, etc.

It will be no surprise that the mere participation of a Muslim in this event irks me. And it does not surprise me that he chose a Muslim woman to play the role; politically smart, as usual. But why in the name of God does he choose someone tainted by connections to the very people who would erase us? Giving these people a place on the national horizon is a mistake. Couldn't he find some Sufi imam, whose version of Islam actually does place far more emphasis on the internal jihad against egoism?

Bush was hardly better, so I guess I should not be surprised. But I am upset.

"These people" are completely self-confident and unapologetic and clearly wish to replace our society with their own ideology, and they have found their niche in a gutless liberal West, as the perpetual victims, in order to proceed. Galls me deeply.

And I bet her prayer will not be a self-hating de-racinated blurb like the one we can expect from Rev. Mr. Robinson.

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Where's Jay Leno when you need him?

On a gay Catholic website....
I must have slept through this lecture in theology class.

HomoFascism, continued

The number of homosexual men involved in explicitly fascists groups must be infinitesimal. The numbers of homosexual men involved in crypto-communist groups is much larger, since being leftwing is a constituent part of the gay identity. You are far more likely to find a gay man supporting Castro or Hamas than one who is nostalgic for Himmler. Far more. And no one will give the leftoid homo any grief about it.

I am mostly on the same page with people like Hari in my dislike of fascism. I watched some clips from a Rosa Von Praunheim film on neo-Nazi identified gays in Germany. The film simply lets them speak for themselves, in their own words. I found it hard to watch after a few minutes; my stomach started tightening up.

What galls me is that homos can support all kinds of equally vicious leftist forms of totalitarianism and they will get a pass, even get rewarded for it. Loving Hitler is evil. Loving Stalin is...what? A bit misguided?

Most men who grow up homosexual experience a massive wound to their masculine identity. And there are all sorts of ways to deal with that. Attraction to the hypermasculine images associated with fascism is one way. Fascism frankly and enthusiastically makes hierarchical order a value. And rank is a fundamental form of male eros. So it makes sense on that level.

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HomoFascism

Garden-variety lefty Johann Hari has just produced a piece on the threat of gays in fascist movements.

(How did I find this HuffPost post? I was trying to find a therapist for someone in NY, a therapist who'd be a good match for a man who read and liked Androphilia. I googled and one of the links was to a blog called "Androphilia". On which some guy called Gay Species included an assertion that Jack Malebranche aka Donovan, the author of the book, was a skinhead fascist. And he linked to Hari's article, which I then read. The wonders of cyberlinking.)

Fascism. It's about as slippery a term as racism. But Hari at least offers a description of it as "a political ideology advocating hierarchical government that systematically denies equality to certain groups." Hey, I thought this was about fascism, not Islam.

Anyway, Hari makes two mistakes of fact, just for starters.

He places the male-lover bonded Sacred Band of Thebes at Thermopylae as its 300 defenders. All wrong. No historical evidence for that. There were 300 Spartans there at the head of an army of several thousand other Greeks; Thebans were included, but not the Sacred Band. Sloppy gay mythologizing, Mr. Hari.

Second, he calls murdered Dutch gay politician Pim Fortuyn a fascist because he found the growing numbers of Muslims in Holland a threat to its culture and social order. Fortuyn was more of a libertarian, but understood that liberty can only function in a culture of liberty. Which Islam is definitely not. According to Hari's own definition, Fortuyn could not be a fascist. Again, sloppy leftoid blahblah.

Speculatively, imagine if the inrush of immigration into Holland were not North African Muslims, but South African Afrikaaners going back to the land of their ancestors. Do you think for a moment that the left would hesitate to name the threat which the immigrants posed to Holland's tolerant democratic order? Please. The rule: only Whites can be evil; people of color, never (unless forced by circumstances laid on them by whites.)

Moving on, he matter-of-factly condemns fascism, especially in its Nazi form, as "the most hateful and evil political movement of all"? Pardon my dissent. Was/is Nazism hateful and evil? Of course. It was a form of dictatorial totalitarianism. But only one form. Older, briefly contemporary, and longer-lasting and more murderously and globally damaging is The Other Fascism: Communism.

Nazism was, without doubt, a horror of the first magnitude. But I submit that what is supposed to make it most evil --its racism-- is precisely what makes it less evil than Communism. It is utterly clear (at least now; Euros then as now were very often blind to it) that National Socialism is an ideology benefitting a particular ethnic group. Its self-interest is blatant and upfront about Aryans vs the rest of the inferior world, especially Jews.

Communism is more hateful and evil because it masquerades as an angel of light for an oppressed worldwide undergroup transcending race and parades equality as its banner. In fact, in every case where it has struck, it is precisely fascist, totalitarian, vengeful against whatever group held "privilege" prior to its arrival, vastly murderous of both body and soul, and blights whatever it touches. In seventy years, 100 million dead.

And, as testy and thorough Aussie John Ray has pointed out, one of the big lies of the last century, still in force, is that Nazism was a right-wing movement. This allows leftist to paint all righties as Nazis*. In fact, Nazism and Communism are both forms of socialist fascism, each one as totalitarian as the other and each as given to tyranny. Hitler....then, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, PolPot, KimJongIl, Ceaucescu, Castro, etc. etc. etc. See Jonah Goldberg.

I note here, by the way, that it is Islam which fits the above definition of fascism, and while Hari is all bothered about homosexuals in European fascist movements, past and present, he is blind to and silent about the deeply anti-gay and anti-Semitic religious fascism growing under his highminded gay nose. Again, typical lefty denial.

And while I am at it. I suspect that part of what makes fascism and Nazism so uniquely evil for Mr. Hari is their Jew-hatred. Fair enough. No argument. But, I ask, which group is the effective heart of Jew-hatred today and which entity sits by silently and complicity while it grows louder and more vile by the day? Not the fascists, but the Muslims and their lefty allies, and their dickless societies of post-Christian bien-pensant Euro dhimmis-in-training.

I have some thoughts on the "substance" of the article, male homosexuals and fascism, but for another post. I have to go off now and get to the gym, shave my head, put on my uniform, get together with my secret lover and oppress someone of color.

*And why, btw, I ask, why did George Bush never get around to opening all those camps he had set up for us homos? Could the man do nothing right? I expected this to be included in his confessional list of mistakes, but alas, no.

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Gay, yes; bishop, sorta

It seems Prez O has invited gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson to pray at a pre-inaugural prayer fest. Rev. Robinson has said it is a nice way to embrace all the people, GLBTs included...but he has announced that he will not be using the Bible for his prayer or making it Christian, since not everybody is Christian. and previous inauguration prayers "horrified" him by how "aggressively Christian" they were. Wow, so open.

So even though not everyone is GLBT, he is accepting this public view on behalf of that group, yet he decides that since not everyone is Christian, the bishop (!) is going to erase his Christianity for the sake of inclusiveness. Well, since there are atheists in America, why pray at all? Why not include them by shutting up?

The metamessage here is that being GLBT is important and will be proclaimed to the nation, but that being Christian is not and will be hidden. Or maybe it is so important, as a negative, that it must be hidden.

This is how liberal "diversity" really works. Any traditionally successful (aka "dominant" or "conventional") group must erase itself in order to make room for the traditionally unsuccessful (aka "oppressed" or "minority") group.

I wonder if any imams are invited and if they will be acting as if they are not imams. We know how ecumenical and humble Muslims are about all this.

And if any black Christian preachers show up and use the Bible and Jesus in prayer, I am sure Rev. Gene will "respect their choice". Cause we all know that blacks have an instinctually religious nature and their history of oppression, blah, blah, blah.

Why does this bug me?

Because it is part of the suicidal confidence game whereby what is called "diversity" is actually dissolution. The so-called celebration of difference is actually a hatred of difference, real difference. Only the pre-arranged potted plants are allowed to be "different." And it is the people and traditions who have made the West who are expected to dissolve, all in the name of this highminded bullshit.

I am no fan of Rev. Robinson. It seems to me that for a man to accept episcopal ordination knowing that it would split his church in two...well, I guess that's what Protestants do.

And as you know, I think they are all on their way to becoming Unitarians. Which is fine, for Unitarians! They're not making believe about it.

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My anti-semitism, a note

Clear-eyed, butch-mouthed Canuckess Kathy Shaidle at FiveFeetofFury, who doth not suffer Mohammedans gladly, has a note on the Jewish non-response to the pro-Hamas Death-to-Israel rallies across Canada. She wonders if too many Jews are stuck thinking that Christians are their enemies rather than Muslims.

BTW, she remarks that in her Catholic school childhood, it was made very clear to her that anti-Semitism was a sin. Same here, from the nuns and the priests. Right smack dab in the middle of 1950's NY Irish Catholicism.

It was made clear that it was our sins that killed Jesus and that the Jews of the time were only God's instrument. And the words of Pius XI, "spiritually, we are all Semites", were quoted.

Social anti-Semitism certainly existed. In the rough-and-tumble of NY, we called each other names in the playground and on the street before it became a capital crime (for Prince Harry but not for Muslim thugs and friends during DeathToJews rallies) but there was no theological support for it.

Certainly Jesus was God and the Jews denied it. Certainly the Church of Rome was the One True Religion and the Protestants denied it. But what we knew and which the highminded asshats who dominate our culture now don't know is that you can actually disagree with someone on a fundamental level and still be friendly, neighborly...hell, even fall in love with them and marry them. It's called tolerance.

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Mozilla's Breakdown

My religioussexualpolitical interests tend to take me to divergent places on the net.

This morning, after my usual perusal of the usual suspects, I opened a site that tracks and promotes the return of traditional Roman liturgy in the Catholic Church and then also a site which promotes a "progressive, gay, Catholic agenda" somewhere in the Midwest.

While I was pouring myself a cup of coffee, I got a message that my Mozilla Firefox browser had encountered an insoluble problem and closed itself down.

I can relate.

:)

An unsettling image

Part of recent pro-Hamas and anti-Jew protests in San Francisco. The local ummah prostrates to their god Allah, with the city hall of SF in the background.

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