(Video Content) Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) spoke to attendees of the CPAC conference this past Friday. He received a much warmer welcome than his appearance last year during his campaign for President.
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Today the Southern Poverty Law Center numbers 926 hate groups in the United States, up by over 50% over the 602 documented in 2000.
To qualify, a group has to spread propaganda attacking minorities or stage events—from hate-filled graffiti to actual assaults—that target minorities for special abuse—though mainstream groups like the New York Post would probably not be included. The list includes neo-Nazis, black separatists, the KKK, and skinheads bashing racial minorities.
The SPLC credits the rise to a number of factors—most recently the economic downturn and the Obama presidency—contributing to the proliferation of fear, backlash, and hate.
I have to wonder whether the boom in new media, namely blogging and text messaging, is a factor, too. Certainly benign in themselves, these tools can facilitate communication and organization among aspiring bigots.
Why all the hate?
Well, poor education, limited life experience, and economic factors often influence the formation and growth of organizations engaged in scapegoating immigrants, welfare recipients, and religious minorities, safe enough to blame when things are going wrong, though seldom, oddly, the rich, the smallest yet most influential minority—not at any rate the white Christian rich.
And the elevation of any detested minority—whether to the Presidency or just to a reasonably successful TV series—is often perceived as an insult to those whose identification with the traditional power groups—Christian, male, American-born—is their sole source of self-esteem.
Coincidentally Clint Eastwood was reported today as defending racial humor, decrying political correctness. “In … earlier days,” the 78-year-old actor-director-musician reminisced, “every friendly clique had a ‘Sam the Jew’ or ‘Jose the Mexican’ – but we didn’t think anything of it or have a racist thought. It was normal that we made jokes based on our nationality or ethnicity. That was never a problem.”
And assuming, with good reason, Eastwood is not defending racism or hate, I would agree. Somehow we moderns, particularly we Americans, have become a thin-skinned, humorless group quick to grab media attention or file lawsuits on pretenses Mrs. Grundy would embrace. We seem no longer to be an America who can understand the wit of Mark Twain, W.C. Fields, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and Sarah Silverman, whose outrageous parodies of closed-mindedness are now too often taken to be the thing itself.
And yet for all our propriety over racially charged language, we’re still a culture who can criticize Barack Obama for not being black enough and for using his blackness to some advantage, without recognizing the implicit bigotry and illogic in such charges. People who would never say the “n word” can still be awfully uncritical of their own racism and ethnocentrism, provided they never express it in conventionally abusive terms.
But the problem is attitudes, not words.
As a frequent grader of student essays, I routinely encounter all kinds of hate speech, almost all of it artfully avoiding use of hot-button language (though usually this is the only artful thing about them). Vindictiveness towards gays can be made to sound almost Christlike—so there are days when, as a gay man, I am thankful for Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, whose bald, forthright bile and venom are anything but sugared. These days hatred of Arabs and Muslims can be made to sound like compassion for the victims of 9-11 and the good people (mostly children, apparently) of Israel. (I recently read a student essay that, in the nicest possible way, called for the genocide of the Palestinians living in Gaza.) And it seems easy enough to impugn the honesty, intelligence, and cleanliness of Spanish-speaking immigrants in general without resorting to a single epithet—and not only that, but also sound like a defender of the world’s poor and dispossessed.
I understand hate. I won’t pretend otherwise. I have a hatred of the very rich and the arrogant. I like to think I don’t generalize my hatred—its targets are usually specific or, at any rate, restrictive to those who have drawn my ire through their actions. On occasion I prejudge on the basis of income bracket or propensity to snap one’s fingers at underlings—but I try to leash and minimize my prejudices, sometimes by simply being honest and apologetic about them.
What I’m saying is that, as dismaying as the growth of violent and fire-breathing hate groups is, I’m more disturbed by the easy way hate enters our discourse politely—with a well-scrubbed face and neatly combed hair. The way plausible deniability can be perceived as a fair excuse for obvious codes of racism—and here I’m thinking about the detestable New York Post cartoon of the shooting death of the “chimp” who “wrote” Obama’s stimulus plan—and, yes, by the way, I do catch the allusions to the infinite monkey theorem and the headline-grabbing shooting of Travis the performing chimpanzee—but I see the plain-as-the-nose-on-my-face racist stereotype, too.
One more thing—racism in America has long served the interests of those who hold power. Not that the rich and influential usually have to put on sheets and hoods themselves—or put on black-face to caricature the funny mannerisms of the stereotype—but by using race as a wedge to divide the working classes—and divert righteous anger over economic injustices towards bitterness and lunatic hate—the elites have long been able to escape scrutiny and condemnation for their flagrant abuses of privilege and power.
It’s not coincidental that hate groups proliferate in times of economic distress, but the lurking variable here may be those who benefit most from poor workers turning against each other, rather than uniting in a common cause to advance their own economic interests.
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http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=366
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/people,2026,clint-eastwood-defends-racist-jokes-from-pc-brigade,75370
The third episode of Andrew Napolitano’s Freedom Watch with guests Glenn Beck, Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), and Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital.
Representative Ron Paul (Texas-R) addresses Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernake in regards to the definition of inflation, while asking Bernake if he could in fact be wrong about applying failed Keynesian concepts as solutions to the current economic crisis.
February 25, 2009
In my British literature class today, we were discussing Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, in which Carlyle, who lost his faith in the Calvinist religion he was raised in, conservatively argues that the forms of Christianity (in particular, the idea of duty) have value in structuring culture, even in an age of doubt and skepticism.
Several students raised the issue of religion and meaninglessness and morals, arguing that without a belief in God there can be no morals because life then has no meaning.
Carlyle’s point, though, is that work and action have meaning even without a fundamental faith in myths of origins and without a clear view of the future towards which one is supposedly working. His stance is that doubt is better than faith when doubt works in the interest of a genuine love of truth and faith provides only a pleasant fantasy in which one cocoons oneself from the harshness and indifference of history and the cosmos.
People who say that they need belief in God because existence would be too terrifying without it are, at heart, pleasure-seekers—even worse, as Carlyle implies, because they are pleasure-seekers willing to sacrifice truth on the altar of comfortable illusion.
To act, for Carlyle, is better than to believe. Some students objected though that moral action has no merit apart from a belief in a God who judges those actions. I pointed out that the Greeks developed a sophisticated moral sense based on the needs of society, quite apart from their gods, who, as forces of nature, acted any way but morally.
One student objected, stating that this precisely was her problem with “secular philosophers”: they argued about morality—what made a man or a republic good—but failed to find a center or reason for moral behavior. And therefore each successive philosopher debunks the findings of his predecessor, and we are then left with a belief in nothing.
I pointed out that religion did not solve this problem any better—because just as philosophers cannot agree on their conception of the Good, theologians cannot agree on their conception of God—and, further, a 21st century Christian’s concept of God is markedly different from a 19th century Christian’s concept.
At bottom, there is a problem with idealism, I think. The purity of concept that idealism demands is incompatible with taking action, because no real action can embody an ideal. Our choices are then to preserve moral ideals—encase them, codify them, study and defend them—or to act on them.
Simply to preserve principles of morality is a form of idolatry, one that does nothing to ensure that culture grows and flourishes. Its focus is entirely purity of form, and that purity must never be sullied by crass action—such morality has limitless capabilities, but no duty to act.
To act morally, though, means to rub shoulders with the realities of life at a particular time, under particular circumstances, and in the process almost certainly to watch as that morality mutates or evolves into something altogether different. But it is the latter morality, not pure and not ideal, and constantly mutating, that has the force to push culture forward—whereas the rarefied ideal morality is decadent, self-absorbed, and impractical.
Surely, then, it is better to pursue goodness in one’s actions—even at the risk of making mistakes, perhaps even in unintentionally doing harm (and here it’s useful to remember that Carlyle hated utilitarianism, which argues that ends justify means, regardless of intentions—and judges results in terms of statistical norms)—than to define and defend a pristine goodness that is impossible to perform.
Though I can’t say that I buy into all of Carlyle’s ideas—and hardly any of his Tory politics or love of duty for duty’s sake—I think he’s on to something here. Certainly the problem with the great ideologies—Christianity, for instance, or, for that matter, liberalism or conservatism—is that they are prone to self-absorption, endlessly refining themselves and polishing themselves up to the point that they cannot be touched, much less performed.
We cannot reduce morality to a set of rules without destroying the dynamic power of morality. Likewise, we cannot simply believe in moral precepts and believe that that belief, without works, without action, without performance, is enough. And we cannot so spiritualize or intellectualize morality that it loses touch with ordinary human existence—or fails to address real human problems, such as hunger, homelessness, panic, and despair.
An inflexible idealism, though awe-inspiring to look at, never gets its hands dirty. In effect, in reality, all it can do is criticize and destroy. Nothing, in fact, that leaves a grimy footprint can ever measure up to its pure ideals.
And, as Carlyle puts it, the gulf between capability and performance is immense. Moral and political ideologues work best when they have no power whatsoever—but display a sense of vast though untested capability. Then they can stand on the sidelines and shine superiorly.
This week’s update discuses why “small is beautiful” and the impossibility of the global banker’s math. Their drive to maintain infinite expansionism violates natural law.Yet, there is an answer, a silver lining which we can all celebrate.
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(Original Content) - Editor’s Note: Possibly NSFW -
For over a Decade now, the leggy blond skeletal framed female pundit and author known as Ann Coulter, has spewed her political inanities and absurdities. In the process, she penned several best selling books serving to incite her fellow conservative minions. Her vitriolic pen and incorrect or sometimes wholly absent fact checking/sourcing has gone relatively unchallenged by mainstream American culture.
For some time now, she has been expounding on the sexuality of her liberal targets, accusing John Edwards of being gay1, insisting MSNBC host Chris Matthews has a “man crush” on Barack Obama2, and questioning Al Gore’s masculinity3, just to name a few. Recently, during an interview with Joy Behar on CNN, who was sitting in for Larry King, she went so far as to opine that conservative women experience greater, more powerful orgasms than her liberal counterparts.4
I thought, “That’s it, I have heard enough!” How in the hell would she know enough about the dynamics of human sexuality to make such an outrageous statement? On what research model did she base this utterly preposterous assumption and point of view? It could not possibly be based on her life experience, unless, of course, she has engaged in sufficient enough sexual activity with liberal and conservative women, or at least observed same, conventional logic dictates.
She claims to have attended dozens of Grateful Dead concerts all over the country.5 Anyone who has ever attended even one such performance, is instantly reminded that they are witnessing a miniature Woodstock: Masses of scantily clad and unclad youth reveling in a dope induced euphoria where casual sex is as easily obtained as a joint or other hallucinogen. My imagination does not permit me to see Miss Coulter lying on a blanket on the ground, or in a Volkswagen minibus, groveled and defiled by some long hair tattooed devotee of Jerry Garcia. Any person who has ever had sex with Ann Coulter has most certainly never bragged about it publicly, let alone even acknowledged such behavior.
The disposition she manifests in her public persona is repellant to any such notion of coitus. When I hear her drone on in her condescending nasal utterances, as she bullies her way through interviews, she reminds me of a modern day Circe (The vixen who turned Odysseus’ men into pigs), except she turns her male followers into sheep. She exudes what most right wing media stars do to attract their ovine like audiences, while they bleat their pronouncements about the evils of liberals they liken them to a horde of locusts descending on the country’s body politic.
When many of my friends returned from Vietnam in the 60 and 70, they told me about some of the unpublished horrors they experienced and heard while in uniform of our armed services. Two stories which come to mind when I think about Ann Coulter. One, was a rumor that any G.I. should be wary of having unprotected sex with local Vietnamese women because they had a V.D. that, “Scared the shit out of penicillin!” and two, If you opted to use penile protection, some Vietnamese prostitutes put razor blades in their vagina that would slice a penis to ribbons!
Thus, I have no idea who or with whom Ann Coulter has had sex with…Sheep perhaps, that I would buy.
Source(s): 1Denver Post “Coulter’s Gay Slur Draws Fire” • 2AOL News Political Machine “Chris Matthews’ Mancrush Obama” • 3Media Matters “The Coulter-Matthews-Dowd continuum” • 4Salon “Joy Behar vs. Ann Coulter: The smackdown” • 5Newsweek “The Secret War”
Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) was the scheduled pre-panel guest this past Friday on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” Mr. Maher, whose political affiliations change quicker than the fashions of a New York catwalk, attempted quite unsuccessfully to pigeonhole Dr. No as a do-nothing capitalist in his opposition to President Obama’s pork-filled spending extravaganza.
However, Dr. Paul eloquently schooled the host relating to the common misnomer that capitalism, free-markets, and deregulation are Prima facie for the economic malaise and instead rightly laid the blame at the feet of both the nanny state and private bank monopoly of the FEDERAL RESERVE. By the end of the interview, Representative Paul drew applause from the audience on several occasions for his stance on ending the drug war, his mainstay of a non-interventionist foreign policy, and even his economic stance, much to the chagrin of Mr. Maher who apparently now worships at the shrine of Obama.
Mr. Maher’s newfound love of socialism is a complete 180 degree departure from his former libertarian mantra adorned during the mid and late 1990’s. Thus proving once again, pseudo-television pundits/comedians cannot trip over themselves fast enough to keep themselves en vogue with the political chic of the moment.
This evening Glenn Beck was joined by guests Gerald Celente, Stephen Moore, former CIA operative Bob Baer, and former CIA employee Michael Scheuer in an attempt to present and discuss three possible “War Room” scenarios that could come to fruition within the next 5 years. Dow at 2800? Martial Law? Revolution? Just what are we headed for? And how will the American people prepare and cope?
Speaking from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli calls for a second Tea party as a response to the latest bailout/stimulus bill signed into law by President Obama this past Tuesday. You can hear the traders on the floor echo his call for a true free market where people who make bad decisions are not rewarded with a government handout.
