Without commentary, I could think of no tribute more fitting than this.
Friday, July 15, 2016
La Marseillaise by Edith Piaf
Without commentary, I could think of no tribute more fitting than this.
French Lives Matter
The death toll is way over 80 now, not quite up to the 130 killed last November but far worse than the January 2015 killing of 11 that had us writing je suis Charlie although we weren't much like and didn't much like Charlie and still don't.
Are we Nice now? No, but all we talk about is the danger of being shot by one or more of the 200 million or more guns in private hands in the USA. We've been spared attacks by foreign terrorists on that scale since 2001 when George W was keeping us safe with his "strength." Obama is weak, of course. We've been told that since the beginning of his presidency. He's weak, and "he will be tested" and "we will be attacked." Another one of those dire predictions we believe despite their regular failure to come true.
Will we be Nice now or will this one fail to dominate the news with the Cleveland cesspool about to open? Do French lives matter enough to merit the full mourning, healing and closure seeking news cycle? Will I be seeing more of those smug posters and posts and cartoons about how hypocritical and racist we are for interfering with a certain publicity campaign I'm tired of talking about? French lives matter - now there I've gone and said it.
But we need to and we certainly will search for someone to blame and Obama is already on the short list. It will be hard to blame lax gun laws in France with its level of gun control that will never be accepted in the US and that this was done with a truck will challenge us to keep the talk entirely about guns, much less "assault" weapons. Assault truck bans are hard to propose with a straight face.
Will anyone make the case for our current administration's relative success in keeping ISIS attacks to a bare minimum when compared to all those deaths in Europe? Well, I doubt it and this awful story will be hard to fit into the formulaic assault that is our presidential campaign. Besides there's Pokemon Go.
Are we Nice now? No, but all we talk about is the danger of being shot by one or more of the 200 million or more guns in private hands in the USA. We've been spared attacks by foreign terrorists on that scale since 2001 when George W was keeping us safe with his "strength." Obama is weak, of course. We've been told that since the beginning of his presidency. He's weak, and "he will be tested" and "we will be attacked." Another one of those dire predictions we believe despite their regular failure to come true.
Will we be Nice now or will this one fail to dominate the news with the Cleveland cesspool about to open? Do French lives matter enough to merit the full mourning, healing and closure seeking news cycle? Will I be seeing more of those smug posters and posts and cartoons about how hypocritical and racist we are for interfering with a certain publicity campaign I'm tired of talking about? French lives matter - now there I've gone and said it.
But we need to and we certainly will search for someone to blame and Obama is already on the short list. It will be hard to blame lax gun laws in France with its level of gun control that will never be accepted in the US and that this was done with a truck will challenge us to keep the talk entirely about guns, much less "assault" weapons. Assault truck bans are hard to propose with a straight face.
Will anyone make the case for our current administration's relative success in keeping ISIS attacks to a bare minimum when compared to all those deaths in Europe? Well, I doubt it and this awful story will be hard to fit into the formulaic assault that is our presidential campaign. Besides there's Pokemon Go.
Thursday, July 14, 2016
Call Me A Racist
In our world, in our time, there are no concerns, no problems that have no organized advocates or critics, complete with packaged opinions and talking points and etiologies and eschatologies one might compare to a cult. Everyone is "raising awareness," placing blame and yet offering no solutions unless you consider "kill the cops" or a lynch mob (literal or metaphorical) to be a solution. Is it any wonder we don't solve problems and that we polarize and stigmatize and hyperbolize everything that happens or doesn't happen beyond the point of rational discussion?
Police shoot people every day and we rightly worry that some misunderstanding, some trigger-happy officer may have occasion to gun us down. We worry because our lives matter, those of our family and friends matter and if we're good people the lives of other people matter. It's really a cornerstone of civilization, and compassion and a concern for justice are likewise universally lauded virtues.
Yet once again yesterday I was scolded, denounced and verbally trashed for reacting to yet another BLM cartoon explaining carefully as to an idiot, that people who say that all lives matter are only covering up the bigotry they, as Caucasians possess. Do they speak for all black people, do they offer a plan of action to work for justice? I'm wrong for asking.
So what of the cartoon in circulation explaining carefully that the man standing alone with his house on fire gets no help from the man whose house is not because that man says "all lives matter." iSo what if it's self-contradictory and slanderous? Just accept that his callous lack of concern represents those who say "all lives matter."
It contradicts itself. It makes no sense. Compassion for life will by definition compel me to help you, not to ignore you. If one life matters it's because all life matters, one follows from the other. To reject that is to claim that only black lives matter. To reject that "Black lives matter too" is true is an assertion that only black lives matter. Is accepting that a requirement to call oneself a liberal? If so, I'm certainly not.
If I refer you to the video I watched this morning of two policemen gunning down a young white man that they stopped for having burned rubber at an intersection. Will you say his life doesn't matter? Will you call me nasty names, treat me as though I were stupid if I shed a tear for a lost life? Will you start chanting and blocking traffic? Will you write headlines about being murdered for spinning his tires? Will you demand the officers be jailed without due process and without other facts being considered? Think carefully, it's a test, and if you insist his case is different, you flunk.
They approached him with guns drawn before he exited his vehicle. They shot him over and over with a semi-automatic handgun and once with a pump-action shotgun at close range. He was unarmed. He was lying on the ground. He just wasn't "following orders." Will you go out in the street and chant and stop traffic and bring your home town to a stop because his life, his death mattered? Will you dance around chanting "hands up - don't shoot?"
Life matters and if you don't think so, your life matters all the less for it. Life is accidental in this endlessly hostile universe and it's precious and fragile and to me, sacred. I don't care about your politics or the philosophical boogaloo you need to do to make it seem otherwise.
Police shoot people every day and we rightly worry that some misunderstanding, some trigger-happy officer may have occasion to gun us down. We worry because our lives matter, those of our family and friends matter and if we're good people the lives of other people matter. It's really a cornerstone of civilization, and compassion and a concern for justice are likewise universally lauded virtues.
Yet once again yesterday I was scolded, denounced and verbally trashed for reacting to yet another BLM cartoon explaining carefully as to an idiot, that people who say that all lives matter are only covering up the bigotry they, as Caucasians possess. Do they speak for all black people, do they offer a plan of action to work for justice? I'm wrong for asking.
So what of the cartoon in circulation explaining carefully that the man standing alone with his house on fire gets no help from the man whose house is not because that man says "all lives matter." iSo what if it's self-contradictory and slanderous? Just accept that his callous lack of concern represents those who say "all lives matter."
It contradicts itself. It makes no sense. Compassion for life will by definition compel me to help you, not to ignore you. If one life matters it's because all life matters, one follows from the other. To reject that is to claim that only black lives matter. To reject that "Black lives matter too" is true is an assertion that only black lives matter. Is accepting that a requirement to call oneself a liberal? If so, I'm certainly not.
If I refer you to the video I watched this morning of two policemen gunning down a young white man that they stopped for having burned rubber at an intersection. Will you say his life doesn't matter? Will you call me nasty names, treat me as though I were stupid if I shed a tear for a lost life? Will you start chanting and blocking traffic? Will you write headlines about being murdered for spinning his tires? Will you demand the officers be jailed without due process and without other facts being considered? Think carefully, it's a test, and if you insist his case is different, you flunk.
They approached him with guns drawn before he exited his vehicle. They shot him over and over with a semi-automatic handgun and once with a pump-action shotgun at close range. He was unarmed. He was lying on the ground. He just wasn't "following orders." Will you go out in the street and chant and stop traffic and bring your home town to a stop because his life, his death mattered? Will you dance around chanting "hands up - don't shoot?"
Life matters and if you don't think so, your life matters all the less for it. Life is accidental in this endlessly hostile universe and it's precious and fragile and to me, sacred. I don't care about your politics or the philosophical boogaloo you need to do to make it seem otherwise.
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Then I Said In My Heart That This Also Is Vanity
Perhaps nothing to do with the way we think is more demonstrated than the fact that we humans are nothing like rational beings. We're beings who use all sorts of gymnastics to justify our opinions and we fight strongly against contradiction or simply ignore it as suits our equilibrium, our party affiliation, our inherited creeds or opinions we associate with our peers. The mechanics of cognitive dissonance are well described and illustrated, but the stronger the opinion, the more intransigent, the more these mechanics are ignored by the factually challenged.
"Our reasoning, or at least that what we offer as the product of reasoning is regulated by emotion, not by dispassionate analysis and its goal is to minimize threats to the self" Writes Mario Livio and the rampant and irreconcilable differences in opinion concerning most aspects of American life would seem to make it irrefutable. Nobody changes their mind, or at least very rarely. You'll see it at the macro and micro ends of the scale of things. Listen to Joe Biden tell us there are more deadly shootings because "the bullets are getting bigger" when the opposite is true although part of a fear raising agenda. To say otherwise means accepting you were wrong, your mentors are wrong and your argument is less than impeccable. So we go on restating the problem as though our pet solution were attached to it and ours alone.
But of course the size of bullets is less relevant than other factors, but to address that, to offer more rigorous analysis of a real problem risks fracking a fragile code, a rickety dogma that can raise the fear of an ontological crisis. "Who am I if all my axioms are false?" Our defenses are sometimes Manic, We respond with a flurry of arguments as though to be a moving target. We respond with laughter or mockery or denunciation. I'm tempted to call up the ghost of Melanie Klein and her Manic Defense in which we downplay and minimize the threat with feelings of control, triumph and contempt. Is that what we hear from conservatives as their maxims demonstrate their fragile origins? Perhaps I'm overreaching. This wasn't meant to be a critique of adept but sophistical refutations of fact. It's about the sloppy street versions that sloppy street people adhere to often with violence as a response to perceived offense.
This triumphant and contemptuous banner was offered recently on the Internet and to some people it explains away a frequent criticism of the Black Lives Matter organization. It is of course an attempt at an argument by analogy using an incomplete or broken analogy. The disinterested might observe that not only is the premise that the universality of the specific argument is not an attack on its validity but rather its foundation. To say that only black lives matter is not a moral position. Universality gives it a basis. And of course our theoretical outside and dispassionate observer would inevitably notice that recognition of the universal need for food would result in those with it being required to share it, and not to withhold it. Humanists of course, by asserting universal human rights, are not denying justice to anyone nor by their belief supporting injustice. It's being perceived as an attack only because it attacks the unspoken premise that "only our group matters" Because it equates the group and only the group with working for justice.
If saying "all lives matter" does not rectify injustice, neither does "black lives matter." Neither does chanting "hands up." There is no refutation. Neither offers a solution anyway. It's really not an argument but an attempt to explain contradiction by reformulating the opinion, and doing a really bad job of it. Would black lives matter if no others did? What is a "black life?" Teacher is asking, why isn't your hand up?
But you'll see that as true of false depending not on my argument or theirs but as a result of your political conditioning, group identification, propensity to feel guilt or indeed the need to feel it. Is the cop innocent or guilty? You knew that before the trigger was pulled. How would you feel if innocence or guilt could be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt? Would you doubt anyway would you scoff triumphantly at the evidence or launch into an excoriation of the NRA?
That our aversion to loss far outweighs the attractiveness of gain is well demonstrated. Face it, you don't want to be proven wrong which means you don't want to learn, which means you're just another dumb human ape, like all of us. You will defend the dumb argument, appending all kinds of hypothetical sophistry to it. I'll praise or smugly deny according to my a priori attitudes and I will fight till the end.
"Instead of acknowledging an error in judgement, people tend to reformulate their views in a new way that justifies their old opinions. " Writes Leon Festinger. It's certainly been demonstrated.Do people moderate their views when presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Not necessarily, writes Matthew Syed in today's BBC News Magazine. He concludes, as did Festinger when he coined the term nearly 50 years ago, that experiments demonstrate that
"We use a series of post hoc manoeuvres to reframe anything inconvenient to our original position. We question the probity of the evidence, or the credentials of the people who discovered it, or their motives, or whatever. The more information that emerges to challenge our perspective, the more creatively we search for new justifications, and the more entrenched we become in our prior view."Experimental confirmation of this is copious and other evidence such as a study by Amazon.com some years ago showing that people who read political books never reach across the divide, sticking with those that confirm a certain mindset.
"Our reasoning, or at least that what we offer as the product of reasoning is regulated by emotion, not by dispassionate analysis and its goal is to minimize threats to the self" Writes Mario Livio and the rampant and irreconcilable differences in opinion concerning most aspects of American life would seem to make it irrefutable. Nobody changes their mind, or at least very rarely. You'll see it at the macro and micro ends of the scale of things. Listen to Joe Biden tell us there are more deadly shootings because "the bullets are getting bigger" when the opposite is true although part of a fear raising agenda. To say otherwise means accepting you were wrong, your mentors are wrong and your argument is less than impeccable. So we go on restating the problem as though our pet solution were attached to it and ours alone.
But of course the size of bullets is less relevant than other factors, but to address that, to offer more rigorous analysis of a real problem risks fracking a fragile code, a rickety dogma that can raise the fear of an ontological crisis. "Who am I if all my axioms are false?" Our defenses are sometimes Manic, We respond with a flurry of arguments as though to be a moving target. We respond with laughter or mockery or denunciation. I'm tempted to call up the ghost of Melanie Klein and her Manic Defense in which we downplay and minimize the threat with feelings of control, triumph and contempt. Is that what we hear from conservatives as their maxims demonstrate their fragile origins? Perhaps I'm overreaching. This wasn't meant to be a critique of adept but sophistical refutations of fact. It's about the sloppy street versions that sloppy street people adhere to often with violence as a response to perceived offense.
If saying "all lives matter" does not rectify injustice, neither does "black lives matter." Neither does chanting "hands up." There is no refutation. Neither offers a solution anyway. It's really not an argument but an attempt to explain contradiction by reformulating the opinion, and doing a really bad job of it. Would black lives matter if no others did? What is a "black life?" Teacher is asking, why isn't your hand up?
But you'll see that as true of false depending not on my argument or theirs but as a result of your political conditioning, group identification, propensity to feel guilt or indeed the need to feel it. Is the cop innocent or guilty? You knew that before the trigger was pulled. How would you feel if innocence or guilt could be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt? Would you doubt anyway would you scoff triumphantly at the evidence or launch into an excoriation of the NRA?
That our aversion to loss far outweighs the attractiveness of gain is well demonstrated. Face it, you don't want to be proven wrong which means you don't want to learn, which means you're just another dumb human ape, like all of us. You will defend the dumb argument, appending all kinds of hypothetical sophistry to it. I'll praise or smugly deny according to my a priori attitudes and I will fight till the end.
suicidaly Moral
It's inevitable that some people's first reaction to someone running amok with deadly weapons was that the police erred in using an explosive device to "neutralize" him during a long deadly firefight, from which he had been given the option to surrender. After all, his civil rights were violated in several ways and nothing one does can ever waive such rights -- right?
No, I guess the cops should have just dragged it out, allowing him time to escape and an opportunity to kill one more victim. It's the moral way, right?
But worst of all in the pacifist mind, of course was the D word: drone. The word obviously no longer means a male bee or a moving target used for gunnery practice and as with many words that are emotional surrogates for misunderstood things and deeds, it's a drone in and of itself. It replaces something in order to keep it from harm. But of course just as in much of the rhetoric concerning weapons, the words themselves are rhetorical weapons. A remotely operated device is not an autonomous device without a human operator. It's not really a drone, just as the weapon used in Dallas wasn't an Assault rifle according to US Army definitions. These altered terms are devices used to protect an argument from scrutiny. Drone words.
Someone is driving this device, someone is watching and probably getting advice from superiors. Someone is pulling the trigger. Someone is there with a microphone to say "come out with your hands up or you will be shot."
Stop calling it a drone. It's only a cop in a suit of armor.
Of course when neurotic pacifists describe any violent act, no matter how unavoidable, they'll say it was avoidable. We could have arrested Hitler, for instance, we could have arrested Osama bin Laden by sending in the police to read him his rights and using a search warrant. Don't laugh, I've been handed that argument, smug condescension, neurotic delusion and all.
Is it that people who argue that this is wrong also hate the Dallas Police because they are police and mostly white and not because they did anything wrong? Or is it an Americanized version of Ahimsa, the practice of self sacrifice to avoid the death of anything, including bacteria?
Sorry, again. Sending a man or woman to die or to expose him to deadly circumstances to avoid harming an active murderer, rather than having him or her use a remotely operated device, whether flying or walking, is not a moral act and if you think so you're wrong.
No, I guess the cops should have just dragged it out, allowing him time to escape and an opportunity to kill one more victim. It's the moral way, right?
But worst of all in the pacifist mind, of course was the D word: drone. The word obviously no longer means a male bee or a moving target used for gunnery practice and as with many words that are emotional surrogates for misunderstood things and deeds, it's a drone in and of itself. It replaces something in order to keep it from harm. But of course just as in much of the rhetoric concerning weapons, the words themselves are rhetorical weapons. A remotely operated device is not an autonomous device without a human operator. It's not really a drone, just as the weapon used in Dallas wasn't an Assault rifle according to US Army definitions. These altered terms are devices used to protect an argument from scrutiny. Drone words.
Someone is driving this device, someone is watching and probably getting advice from superiors. Someone is pulling the trigger. Someone is there with a microphone to say "come out with your hands up or you will be shot."
Stop calling it a drone. It's only a cop in a suit of armor.
Of course when neurotic pacifists describe any violent act, no matter how unavoidable, they'll say it was avoidable. We could have arrested Hitler, for instance, we could have arrested Osama bin Laden by sending in the police to read him his rights and using a search warrant. Don't laugh, I've been handed that argument, smug condescension, neurotic delusion and all.
Is it that people who argue that this is wrong also hate the Dallas Police because they are police and mostly white and not because they did anything wrong? Or is it an Americanized version of Ahimsa, the practice of self sacrifice to avoid the death of anything, including bacteria?
Sorry, again. Sending a man or woman to die or to expose him to deadly circumstances to avoid harming an active murderer, rather than having him or her use a remotely operated device, whether flying or walking, is not a moral act and if you think so you're wrong.
Friday, July 8, 2016
Can We Break the Circle of Fear?
I hate to jump on bandwagons and for sure, everyone who writes on blogs will be writing about all this, either trying to make sense out of madness, or adding to it.
I don't want to add to it or to look for blame or offer an interpretation that no one wants to read -- but I do have questions. Why do arresting officers work themselves into an incoherent lather, screaming hysterically so that anyone they're addressing is more likely to panic than to comply? Anyone who has handled firearms for long enough will realize that when you have your finger on the trigger, guns go off when you least expect it. In fact that fact is used to improve accuracy in target shooting. If you're howling like a wild animal backed into a corner, the gun will go off in your finger is on the trigger. It most certainly will and you'll be as surprised as anyone else when it does.
Are police trained to do this? Why? Why when someone is pinned to the ground and someone yells "gun" and you don't know why, do you start pumping one round after another into the man on the ground, shrieking like scalded cats? Is the technique of descending into group panic designed to turn good men into dangerous cowards?
I'm very tired of the folk psychology about hidden prejudice lurking behind every white face. It makes as little sense as shooting Dallas cops for something that happened in Minnesota, because if we're training police to be trigger happy and paranoid, anyone could be a target, including other policemen. The key word, I think is training, teaching cops to handle people as well as they handle weapons would be a start. As it is, some cops are training the public to fear them and mistrust them to the point of panic and especially minorities. I'd call it a vicious circle if it weren't a cliche'.
Prejudice is a natural part of learning in humans and animals. We make judgments based on past experience -- we prejudge from our training as well. Our reflexes, our conditioned responses are the result of learning from many sources and to say it's hopeless and a property of our race is no less than racism, and although the idiot Trump can say we have to fight fire with fire, we don't. We don't fight racism with racism and we don't have to murder people because they make us nervous and we don't have to make the public terrified by yelling at them as though we were insane. If we're that untrained and unstable we shouldn't be cops in the first place.
I don't want to add to it or to look for blame or offer an interpretation that no one wants to read -- but I do have questions. Why do arresting officers work themselves into an incoherent lather, screaming hysterically so that anyone they're addressing is more likely to panic than to comply? Anyone who has handled firearms for long enough will realize that when you have your finger on the trigger, guns go off when you least expect it. In fact that fact is used to improve accuracy in target shooting. If you're howling like a wild animal backed into a corner, the gun will go off in your finger is on the trigger. It most certainly will and you'll be as surprised as anyone else when it does.
Are police trained to do this? Why? Why when someone is pinned to the ground and someone yells "gun" and you don't know why, do you start pumping one round after another into the man on the ground, shrieking like scalded cats? Is the technique of descending into group panic designed to turn good men into dangerous cowards?
I'm very tired of the folk psychology about hidden prejudice lurking behind every white face. It makes as little sense as shooting Dallas cops for something that happened in Minnesota, because if we're training police to be trigger happy and paranoid, anyone could be a target, including other policemen. The key word, I think is training, teaching cops to handle people as well as they handle weapons would be a start. As it is, some cops are training the public to fear them and mistrust them to the point of panic and especially minorities. I'd call it a vicious circle if it weren't a cliche'.
Prejudice is a natural part of learning in humans and animals. We make judgments based on past experience -- we prejudge from our training as well. Our reflexes, our conditioned responses are the result of learning from many sources and to say it's hopeless and a property of our race is no less than racism, and although the idiot Trump can say we have to fight fire with fire, we don't. We don't fight racism with racism and we don't have to murder people because they make us nervous and we don't have to make the public terrified by yelling at them as though we were insane. If we're that untrained and unstable we shouldn't be cops in the first place.
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
Star Light, Star Bright
"Fluch ist auch ein Segen, Nacht ist auch eine Sonne,"
-Friedrich Nietzsche- Also Sprach Zarathustra
But of course you don't campaign with the facts you actually have, you campaign with the facts you pretend you have and one still hears breathless talk of treason and espionage from the Trump campaign. It creates a sort of fake light that masks the idiocies still so gallantly streaming from those puckered lips. It's not easy though.
Today's Trumpet blast from the golden-haired boy is that more dictators like Saddam Hussein "who knew how to deal with terrorists.*
That's an excellent observation at a time when the motivation for attacking the US is fueled by the fact that we've interfered with democracy and supported vicious tyrants like Saddam Hussein for so long.
What can I say but Shock and Awe?
A curse is also a blessing, the night is also a sun. Light is dark, dark light and Trump will makes us great.
* Nerve gas, torture, germ warfare summary executions, conquest and more.
73 to Juno
For those of you who know the International Radiotelegraph code or Morse as it's popularly known, The letters HI (or more often HIHI) has for a very long time been shorthand for laughter between telegraphers. The sequence .... .. sort of sounds like it, don't you think? Anyway, it's been heard around the world but now also out of this world.
Most of us have heard by now that Spacecraft Juno has entered a Jupiter orbit after years of dancing around the inner planets picking up speed. Not as many know that back in October, 2013 Ham Radio operators around the world participated in a test of one of Juno's radios designed to explore Jupiter's radio spectrum by transmitting the letters HI in slow Morse code as Juno flew past Earth.
Using the 10 meter band, hams tuned to a specific frequency depending on the last letter in their call sign and transmitted HI slowly in synch with the Internet. The test was successful and the signal received from myriad Earthbound transmitters, most no more powerful than 100 Watts, at a distance of over 23,000 miles.
Of course Hams have been talking to the International Space Station for years, but somehow this felt more dramatic even though there was no one on board to listen or answer. Anyway 73 Juno, as one says in code: So long, best wishes.
Most of us have heard by now that Spacecraft Juno has entered a Jupiter orbit after years of dancing around the inner planets picking up speed. Not as many know that back in October, 2013 Ham Radio operators around the world participated in a test of one of Juno's radios designed to explore Jupiter's radio spectrum by transmitting the letters HI in slow Morse code as Juno flew past Earth.
Using the 10 meter band, hams tuned to a specific frequency depending on the last letter in their call sign and transmitted HI slowly in synch with the Internet. The test was successful and the signal received from myriad Earthbound transmitters, most no more powerful than 100 Watts, at a distance of over 23,000 miles.
Of course Hams have been talking to the International Space Station for years, but somehow this felt more dramatic even though there was no one on board to listen or answer. Anyway 73 Juno, as one says in code: So long, best wishes.
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
TO TAKE A MORAL STAND
Even if it means antagonizing the newspaper that publishes my columns, there are times when taking a moral stand becomes necessary.
I write about hate speech. About the bully pulpits of animus and injustice that surround us. I write about pols and trolls and new millennium brown shirts who scapegoat innocent people and paint them with the brush of guilt. Guilt by color. Guilt by race. Guilt by religion. Guilt by association. Guilt according to the news headlines de jour.
Blood libel. Do you know the term? It refers to a medieval superstition that accused Jews of drinking the blood of Christian children. Blood libel lead to pogroms and the mass murder of Jews by Christians throughout Europe. It lead to centuries of anti-Semitism culminating in the Holocaust.
Hate speech laced with blood libel inflames lynch mobs. It turns unhinged people into frenzied insects who swarm online with words of hate and scorn. Swarming insects feasting on blood libel.
The blood libel of medieval Jews is now the blood libel of American Muslims. There have been numerous hate crimes committed against Muslim citizens in recent months. Intimidation. Vandalism of homes and places of worship. Beatings. Gunfire. This weekend, a Muslim man was beaten in the parking lot of a local Mosque.
Good citizens, husbands and fathers, people who pay taxes and fulfill their civic duty who happen to be Muslim Americans … all are turned into objects of ridicule and scorn. Blood libel. It makes no difference what they do. Blood libel. Hate speech is not free speech when innocent people are forced to live in fear, in their homes, in their communities and places of worship. Blood libel.
Meanwhile, bigots wrap themselves in raptures of pretend patriotism and phony piety … and inflame public opinion with toxic blood libel. Here a letter addressed to the editors on my local newspaper:
-----------------------------------------
To the Editors of the Scripps/USA Today newspaper chain:
If a Neo-Nazi group submitted an anti-Semitic hate screed, would you print it? If a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan submitted a racist hate screed, would you print it?
If the answer is “no” to the above questions, then why do you countenance these comments online:
Jim Matthews (See Percy Kepfer letter @ 9:20 AM): “Shouldn't we keep stone age barbaric MoonGod Allah devil worshipers ... from infiltrating modern civilization??”
Jim Matthews (See Gerald James letter @ 9:08 AM): “Stoneage Barbaric devil worship belongs back in their own stoneage caliphate ... totally incompatible with any modern society!!”
William Addeo (see Gerald James letter @ 9:15 AM): “It's time to play Cowboys and muslims.”
William Addeo (see Mohammed Malik column @ 1:40 PM): “You are the enemy Pat Griffis … That's called treason.”
Andrew Treacy (see Anthony Westbury column @ 9:03 AM): “See you all at the next Biker rally” [ note provocation].
William Addeo (see Mohammed Malik column @ 5:56 PM): “Here goes; big mouth, it's time to eat your words … Can a good muslim be a good American? NO, BECAUSE HIS ALLEGIANCE IS TO ALLAH, THE MOON GOD OF ARABIA … What part of this don't you understand? The answer is simple. You are one of THEM. May Jesus Christ, the only God [my bold], bless America.”
Please note the irony (and hypocrisy) of the last comment: “My only God trumps your only God,” and “Freedom for me, but not for thee.”
If your answer is “no” to publishing hate screeds in your newspaper, then your online edition has failed miserably:
William Addeo (see Jack Bergstressor letter @ 1:13 PM): “Hollywood is controlled by Jews … It's all about power and money and control of the masses.”
Note: This comment trades on old shibboleths that equate Jews with power and world domination — straight from the pages of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the book that inspired Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. What next? Crude jokes about ovens of the Holocaust or lynched bodies hanging from Cottonwood trees? If you disavow hate screeds, why then do you allow anti-Muslim comments to flourish unchecked online? Speaking of double standards …
There have been numerous reprisals against Muslim citizens in recent months. A Muslim woman profiled by police was strip searched in public. Intimidation. Vandalism of homes and places of worship. Beatings. Gunfire. This weekend, a Muslim man was beaten at the Fort Pierce Mosque (((but no hate crime according to Sheriff Mascara))).
For Anthony Westbury, the “Patriot Cruise” around the Fort Pierce Mosque is an act of intimidation. He says: “As a community, we need to nip such divisive efforts in the bud before they escalate into hate crimes and cause irreparable damage.” Why then do you countenance hate speech online!
Addeo and Matthews are predatory trolls. They dominate, disrupt, and overwhelm online discussions. They target specific topics and writers for bullying and treat readers with rude ad hominem insults. Please note:
Trolls do not make fools of themselves. When you enable them, they make fools of you.
Recently, I contributed two guest columns on hate speech: (1) “With freedom of speech comes great responsibility” [May 12, 2016], and (2) “Merchants of hate in a moment of crisis” [June 25, 2016]. It is especially galling to devote time and attention on an urgent moral message only to see these efforts undermined by the very same newspaper that hosts bigots and allows its online discussion boards to be used as a medium for hate speech and incitement.
No audience deserves harangues and verbal abuse. What steps will you take to clean up your cesspool? When will you establish a disciplined standard of civil discourse? With comment moderation? And the removal of abusive trolls? I want answers.
July 3, 2016
Monday, July 4, 2016
Shahada
The myth of Sodom and its destruction is a lesson about there being no forgiveness for the mistreatment of strangers and visitors. For centuries, preachers and other liars have pretended it was about sex, but it's not and it remains a lesson for our time.
I continue to be disgusted and offended and embarrassed and angry about the response of the locals to the recent Orlando terrorist attack. Hearing the vicious calumnies leveled at Muslims and a nearby Islamic cultural center, serving American Muslims, I have a hard time separating these subhuman but self-righteous bastards from the people who blow up and shoot up churches and synagogues and clinics: people who give good people good reason to hate the self-styled Christians and patriots who claim this used to be a great country when they had their way. It's never been a great country because it's always been driven by bigots, slavers, genocidal monsters and murderers of the innocent.
I may check the headlines in the local papers, but the editorial pages, both in print and on-line could have been published in any right wing German newspaper in 1936. It's all hate, and all the time. Last Wednesday's paper included a political cartoon labeling Muslims as murderers and bigots as though these good and gentle Christian soldiers didn't stink of the Beast.
All these bozos seem to be scholars of the Quir'an and are quite convinced that it's all about justifying lies that serve jihad and justify slaughter. Of course that's true to exactly the same extent that the Greek nonsense tacked on to the Hebrew bible justifies hatred, intolerance and the actions of the Reverend Jim Jones, David "Koresh" and Timothy McVeigh. Listen to them tell you those weren't "real" Christians but Osama bin Laden was the prototype for all Muslims! Does it even rise to the level of hypocrisy? Is it just inconsistent to go after, to insult and threaten the guy who turned the shooter in to the FBI because he's a Muslim -- or is it just insanity?
It looks like the local law enforcement doesn't want to provide extra patrols and I read with disgust one motorcyclist advocating driving around and around the mosque revving his engine to annoy and intimidate. How can it not remind anyone who remembers those days of Mississippi and Alabama in the 1950's? Does anyone think anyone will be prosecuted for terroristic threats against Muslims?
It's more than hate, it's cowardice, it's fear and panic. It's ignorance and it's everything that makes us the ugliest and meanest of peoples. I can't separate it from our religious and military boasting, another product of cowardice and ignorance.
It would be tempting to blame it on Southern provincialism and Southern rage and Southern custom, but you know, almost everyone here on Florida's Treasure Coast is from somewhere else: New England, New York, New Jersey. It's an American thing, it's a Trump thing, it's a stupid, ugly and evil thing and I'm to the point where, despite my loathing of religion in general, I'm about to bind it on my arm, nail it to my doorpost, wear it on my forehead as frontlets between my eyes: لا إله إلا الله Ù…Øمد رسول الله you miserable bastards. Get the fuck out of my country.
I continue to be disgusted and offended and embarrassed and angry about the response of the locals to the recent Orlando terrorist attack. Hearing the vicious calumnies leveled at Muslims and a nearby Islamic cultural center, serving American Muslims, I have a hard time separating these subhuman but self-righteous bastards from the people who blow up and shoot up churches and synagogues and clinics: people who give good people good reason to hate the self-styled Christians and patriots who claim this used to be a great country when they had their way. It's never been a great country because it's always been driven by bigots, slavers, genocidal monsters and murderers of the innocent.
I may check the headlines in the local papers, but the editorial pages, both in print and on-line could have been published in any right wing German newspaper in 1936. It's all hate, and all the time. Last Wednesday's paper included a political cartoon labeling Muslims as murderers and bigots as though these good and gentle Christian soldiers didn't stink of the Beast.
All these bozos seem to be scholars of the Quir'an and are quite convinced that it's all about justifying lies that serve jihad and justify slaughter. Of course that's true to exactly the same extent that the Greek nonsense tacked on to the Hebrew bible justifies hatred, intolerance and the actions of the Reverend Jim Jones, David "Koresh" and Timothy McVeigh. Listen to them tell you those weren't "real" Christians but Osama bin Laden was the prototype for all Muslims! Does it even rise to the level of hypocrisy? Is it just inconsistent to go after, to insult and threaten the guy who turned the shooter in to the FBI because he's a Muslim -- or is it just insanity?
It looks like the local law enforcement doesn't want to provide extra patrols and I read with disgust one motorcyclist advocating driving around and around the mosque revving his engine to annoy and intimidate. How can it not remind anyone who remembers those days of Mississippi and Alabama in the 1950's? Does anyone think anyone will be prosecuted for terroristic threats against Muslims?
It's more than hate, it's cowardice, it's fear and panic. It's ignorance and it's everything that makes us the ugliest and meanest of peoples. I can't separate it from our religious and military boasting, another product of cowardice and ignorance.
It would be tempting to blame it on Southern provincialism and Southern rage and Southern custom, but you know, almost everyone here on Florida's Treasure Coast is from somewhere else: New England, New York, New Jersey. It's an American thing, it's a Trump thing, it's a stupid, ugly and evil thing and I'm to the point where, despite my loathing of religion in general, I'm about to bind it on my arm, nail it to my doorpost, wear it on my forehead as frontlets between my eyes: لا إله إلا الله Ù…Øمد رسول الله you miserable bastards. Get the fuck out of my country.
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