In this ongoing embroglio of the Mohammed film and filmmaker and the ensuing Mohammedan lunacy, the fallacy of the red herring -- in the minds of the intellectually challenged -- serves to divert attention from the primary point:
No modern Western law forbids or punishes the defamation, slander, mockery or denigration of a historical personage.
Indeed, Western laws actually tend to preserve the sanctity of free thought, free expression and free speech -- which would embrace everything from scholarly "respectful" criticism of Mohammed to the trashiest mockery of him, and anything in between (say, when a Scorsese or a Coen Brothers or a Spielberg ever get around to doing something other than delving into how diseased their own West is, an excellent cinematic dramatization exposing the dark side of Islam's Mohammed). And these Western laws reflect a sociopolitical belief throughout the West precious to us, one won through decades, if not centuries of heated discussion, debates, arguments, even contention and conflicts.
The red herring here is the utmost esteem with which Muslims hold this particular historical personage -- Mohammed. An esteem so keen and fierce, it resembles the reverence for the sacred.
The red herring here is the utmost esteem with which Muslims hold this particular historical personage -- Mohammed. An esteem so keen and fierce, it resembles the reverence for the sacred.
Add in the factor that Muslims are perceived to be a diverse stir-fry of Ethnic Peoples -- or, really, one collective worldwide Ethnic People (with the further division into Moderate Muslims and Extremist Muslims as tenable as that between shrimp and jumbo shrimp) -- whose "religious culture" is inherently connected to their status as an "Ethnic People";
then add in the factor that the modern West labors under a self-imposed paradigm, PC MC (Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism), by which the cultural sensitivities of ethnic peoples tends to trump other concerns, on pain of succumbing to the thought crime of "bigotry" -- a crime worse than Shirk;
then add in the factor that alone among all ethnic peoples (whether actual or perceived), Muslims are the most volatile and violent and have already made good on their threats of deadly violence in various places around the world (following to the letter, indeed, the very blueprint and recipe laid down by the Mohammed they adore so fiercely), thus catapulting them to the top of the list of Ethnic Peoples whose sensitivities and wills must be "respected" by the West above all other concerns;
and you have a recipe for the indigestible Multiculturalist Paella swallowed and regurgitated by the large intestine of the Western mainstream, hastening the morbid pathology of its Body Geopolitic.
This can't go on forever: the Mohammedan antibodies are going to become more and more virulent: the longer we wait to apply an Enemy Enema, the costlier, messier and bloodier will be the outcome. Rather than demand that what's good for the goose is good for the gander -- i.e., condemn Muslims for spitting on our values, our virtue of freedom of thought and speech -- we eat crow as they crow about it.
In the meantime, the stillicidal plop, plop, fizz, fizz of periodic Al-qa Seltzers -- "Oh, what a belief it is!" -- just won't do, and ultimately are only going to exacerbate the disastrously drastic gastrointestinal convulsions coming down the pike.
Our #1 priority now is doing #2. We can't sit on the toilet reading the Koran forever. It's time to evacuate our bowels and flush, already.
Further Recipes:
Mumbai and the PC MC Cookbook
Further Recipes:
Mumbai and the PC MC Cookbook
7 comments:
I agree in part; however, by a simple substitution it can be shown that an additional factor is more important:
If for Muslims we substituted some worldwide organization or cult of white power racists, and imagine that this latter group had been saying and doing, and continue to be saying and doing, everything exactly as Muslims have been and continue to be -- then the West would not be so myopic and paralyzed and obsequious as it now is (and has been for years). The West would of course still be afraid of this white power group, for it would have mass-murdered thousands, and would be continuing to try and would be issuing death threats and menacing the world in various volatile ways -- but the West would not let its rational fear of this group trump what it has to do to protect its societies from this group.
Thus an additional factor besides fear is operative here, that trumps everything else: and this is the Western virtue of tolerance for the Other. Foundationally and culturally, this is a good virtue, but it has morphed irrationally to such a degree it now manifests itself in a multitude of absurd ways that increasingly put our societies in jeopardy.
If you want to read a very lengthy and detailed analysis of this whole process of the West's virtue of tolerance mutating into an irrational principle, please read my former essay on Montaigne:
Montaigne: Godfather of PC MC?
"Foundationally and culturally, this is a good virtue, but it has morphed irrationally to such a degree it now manifests itself in a multitude of absurd ways that increasingly put our societies in jeopardy."
Hesperado, the first part of your statement conflicts with the last part of your statement. Indeed, if 'tolerance for the other' were truly a good virtue rather than a bludgeon of bad virtue, then it would NOT have morphed into that which puts Western societies in jeopardy.
The idea that 'tolerance for the other' is a good virtue is a value judgment that conflicts with the reality in which we currently find ourselves.
Egghead
Egghead,
I don't see why a good virtue can't morph into something bad. That's the whole point of the word "morph".
As I've explained in other essays, it's quite simple:
It's generally speaking a good thing to be tolerant of others outside own's in-group (or tribe). But this virtue of magnanimity can become a vice when it's applied irrationally -- e.g., when one dictates that one *must* tolerate anyone in the out-group, regardless of data that indicates they are deleterious and/or deadly.
On the flip side, one could only argue that tolerance of the Other is *never* a virtue if one could prove that Others are always deleterious and/or deadly -- which would seem a difficult thing to prove, given that historically, all cultures and civilizations (including the West) were not perfectly intact groups from eternity, but had porous and fungible borders, so to speak, by which various Others over time entered and became Western.
Also operative in our present circumstance is the dynamic of exigency and priorities: we may have problems with other "Others", but right now the Muslim Other needs to be on the front burner as a problem to address, because it's a far worse problem.
A virtue is a virtue, and a vice is a vice. Neither becomes the other.
Truth is truth - and never becomes a lie. Although people may lie about the truth, the truth cannot 'morph' into a lie.
Perhaps it is time to re-examine the idea that civilizational 'tolerance of the other' is a virtue for the continued survival of Western civilization and its traditional indigenous peoples.
Civilizational 'tolerance for the other' may lead us all straight to war with each other.
Egghead
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/books-immigration.html
Whether a truth morphs into a lie (and vice versa) seems to be depending IMO on who tries to control the moral monopoly and the and realms of temporal power to such an extent that the lie becomes "official truth" and goes unchallenged by the general public at large. When we consider the MSM being beholden to these cenacles of power, then it is not hard to imagine such an official truth being spoon-fed to the public on a daily basis without the majority of people actually taking notice of it.
In my mind this is sort of reminiscent of medieval Europe, where the moral monopoly (of Roman-Catholicism) was spoon-fed to the commoner on a daily basis, since there was no separation of Church and State. The MSM and the State in the West are increasingly intertwined I believe. The sheer quantity of MSM outlets is not a reflection of ideological pluralism in this day and age, far from it. They all hover around the same contrived rhetoric these days. PC MC still seems to be quite effective as a propaganda exercise that way. How will we be able to wean people away from it if it weren't for people such as us and the many excellent anti-Islam blogs ?
I am more or less suggesting that way that PC MC has become official policy to the point that it has become a new type of religion intertwined with the political power, primarily enforced by self-proclaimed moral elites in the establishment, enabled by the MSM support. Somehow, Islam critics are the de facto Protestants of the 21st century, if I can make the analogy.
Let's face it, progression in modern civilizations can only take hold through the efforts of a relatively small minority of philosophers, scientists and thinkers who question conventional paradigms and who tend to objectively scrutinize such issues because they tend to think laterally, first of all. Which is a far cry from the general public at large, who either seem to want to comply with official policies because they're either subtly indoctrinated that way or either comply out of sheer fear of looking bigoted. (And hence, they both think conventionally.)
Maybe Thomas Jefferson specifically referred to the latter group when he decided that
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."
Egghead,
"A virtue is a virtue, and a vice is a vice. Neither becomes the other."
Well, if you're arguing on the logical level of abstract scholastic epistemology/ontology, you may be right. However, that logic seems moot and/or only tangentially relevant, since you seem to regard this particular virtue we are talking about to be, in fact, *not* a virtue anyway. In order to be thoroughly opposed to tolerance of the Other, one would have to demonstrate that *all* Others are bad for one's in-group. That just doesn't seem to be the case. We need to discriminate -- between Others who on immigrating to the West (now, and throughout the West's history) either pose no harm or contribute relatively good things, and between those other Others who *do* pose harm and contribute mostly bad things (scil., Muslims).
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