The Coming Persecution in America Revisited

The most popular of my blog entries over the years has concerned Christian persecution within America. The next general area of interest is in regard to sex and gender relations. This seems reasonably indicative of where the heads of modern Evangelicals are located.

Revisiting that entry, I must confess a deep disdain and wincing shame. It is not so much that I repudiate any of the ideas expressed. It is that the entry was so horribly written, with inchoate and tangential thoughts and an incoherent flow of argument. Retaining that entry in the public sphere serves as a talisman for a justified humility.

So let me try again.

The Significance of Donald Trump

I watch bemused the gladiatorial spectacle of Donald Trump from afar. He is, without doubt, a thuggish buffoon with the subtlety of mind of a solid cube; who pummels through prudence, rationality, empathy, civility, tact and virtue like a rhino in heat. He is the “ugly American”, raised to the third power, whose simpleton appeal to imbecility, confirms democracy’s devolution towards a Confederacy of Dunces.

The meretricious courtesans of political punditry hope that a fickle populace is merely toying with the witless minds and anxious hearts of a neglectful elite. They give the idiocracy too much wit.

Trump is the Rob Ford of the American Whatever. (It becomes practicably difficult to identify a consistent and rationally coherent ideology or feasible strategic policy to his constipated outbursts.) But with Rob Ford; even after a season of Jimmy Kimmel easy-to-make vignettes about our clown naturale; the Bulldozer of City Hall retained a stubborn third of the popular vote in Toronto, indeed of liberal Toronto; before our Ford finally suffered electoral defeat to cancer. I likewise suspect that contrary to “wish-upon-a-star” analysis, the Trump Nation will endure. The ramifications of the long decline of mind and culture of the American Idiocracy is finally coming to roost.

But Trump himself is not the actual threat. He is but a Storm Trooper of political demagogues to come; a barometer to would-be tyrants of the venality and imbecility at the heart of American politics; a harbinger of the effectual end of free civic society, except for its forms, and individual liberty, rule of law and peace.

In early 2009, I concluded that Junior Bush was the worse American president since James Buchanan; and anticipated that Haughty Obama would be worse still. (On this count, Obama has far exceeded even my expectations.) The defining criteria; failure to recognize and address the rapidly widening ideological, sociopolitical and economic schism, which threatens civic, even bloody, strife. But the Versailles by the Potomac remains in oblivious slumber; indeed contributing to the galloping rush to an imploding abyss, through even greater radicalization of both the Right and the Left.

But I didn’t imagine a three-peat. For what have we here? A WWF contest between the champion of mindlessness and the champion of mendacity; the mindlessness of Trump; the mendacity of Clinton. And the decaying hulk of Pax Americana depends upon these overgrown ignoramuses of entitlement.

Strategies against Nuclear Proliferation omitted a potential threat; that of fools and morons occupying the throne with the most guns; that supposed seat of civilizational sanity.

Listen carefully; do you not hear the gods laughing?

Red State v Blue State Philosophical Sectarianism

It has been a working hypothesis since the late 1980s, and a firm assertion since the mid 2000s; that, to paraphrase Lord Chesterfield’s assessment of the French

In short, all the symptoms which I have ever met with in History, previous to great Civic Conflagrations and Wars, now exist and daily increase in America.1

This certainly comes to mind in recent talk of state nullification of Federal Government edicts and decrees by its executive branch, but more so from its judiciary. Nullification reaches back to Vice President John C. Calhoun (1825-32) who spearheaded use of this principle for South Carolina in the North-South tariff wars; one of the causes of the American Civil War, which has largely been forgotten. As the writer states:

But if some states can pick and choose laws, others will surely do the same—and in such a polarized national landscape, they’ll start picking and choosing increasingly contradictory options. Liberals states will start refusing to enforce laws they don’t like. (This happened with the Fugitive Slave Act, in fact; Wisconsin ruled the law unconstitutional; southerners who otherwise championed states’ rights objected; and the Supreme Court overruled it.) It’s a ticket to dissolving the union, all in the name of preventing same-sex unions.

NSA Revelations and the Implications for Non-Americans

I am not surprised at the technical possibility of the type of NSA data collection that has been revealed by Edward Snowden and the Guardian. Having done some informal research for a couple of corporate clients on spam filters in 2003, the ramifications of that study (i.e. the ability to construct Bayesian algorithms to filter out the 2/3 of text-based emails which were spam at that time) made evident the theoretical means and utility. I recall watching documentaries (i.e. PBS’s Frontline – Top Secret America – September 2011), which intimated the advent of these practices. I still thought that it was still a little into the future.

But having not kept up with the improvements in hardware capacity and capabilities, I was taken aback that the theoretical had become practical so soon. I am astonished by the political will and folly by the political elite of both of the broad political factions and their courtiers and benefactors to eviscerate the letter and spirit of the American Constitution and its Bill of Rights. This has been a slowly increasing practical reality for many generations; only accelerated in the last decade.

In a recent documentary by “For the Record”, called the “Surveillance State”, it records a statement by NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander, made at the American Enterprise Institute on July 9, 2012. In the 41^st and 42^nd minute of that document, he says about the Bluffdale, Utah Data Center:

“I can’t go into the details of the Utah Data Center. We don’t hold data on U.S. Citizens… One. We don’t do that. Two; when you think about just the volume of U.S. emails; just think statistically; just for one minute…think we’re talking about probably, probably you know, 30 trillion emails a year or more. Anybody read that many number of emails.”

This public official spouts deceit. If one was to do a content search on files or emails within their own computer, one would notice how quite amazingly fast that search has become over the years. One does not need to open the email to read. One merely needs to search with appropriate key word (syntax), in the language of each national. And this can be automated.

Regardless; even if Americans were to recover their liberties, this would not extend to protecting the liberties of those outside of their national narcissistic self-concern. The amassing of every electronic data transaction of individuals in Canada, Europe or elsewhere, would continue apace. And that dragnet, could at any time, be used in the future for extorting leveraging on any non-national to serve American self-interests as geopolitical fortunes toss to and fro.

It is hard to believe that limp protests by politically and militarily weak allies or other countries would effectively alter the conduct of America’s intelligence agencies and their overlords. Therefore, what to do?

Money talks in America. And perhaps, it is time that those outside of the U.S., who constitutes 95% total world population, begin to boycott the use of American I.T. products, services and infrastructure. What if global communications could bypass American gateway points, which record all electronic transactions, except when there is particular need for American resources? What if Canada became an alternative base and route for telecom and internet traffic between Europe and Asia for instance? What if there was an international consortium that sought to avoid the American monopoly and hegemony on information flow, (which now constitutes 85% of world bandwidth capacity (PRISM figures))? Are not non-American businesses worried about industrial espionage by this secretive American military-industrial complex? Would the threat of bypassing the U.S. imperialist be sufficient to leverage some restraint on the American political elite?

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I have long believed that the United States was on a trajectory to civil conflagration since the mid-1980s. This was based on the existence of an irreconcilable civilizational-level ideological chasm, which could only widen, deepen and sharpen as the corollaries of each side’s cosmological perspective played itself out in the sociopolitical arena. The problem is not so much in the gulf in ideas; but in the arrogance of each faction attempting to impose their ethic and ethos upon the other and the anticipated antipathetic reaction of the other.

In Thomas Carlyle’s “The French Revolution” (1837), he mentions British diplomat, Lord Chesterfield, anticipating that conflagration in 1753. “In short, all the symptoms which I have ever met with in History, previous to great Changes and Revolutions in government, now exist and daily increase in France.” I have felt the same about the U.S. However, the problem with predictions is timelines. Lord Chesterfield would need to wait another 36 years for the French Revolution to occur.

Around mid-May, I thought that there was enough evidence to place the timeline of real evidence of civil strife in the U.S. within a decade. With these latest NSA revelations and all of the corollaries to be concluded from them, it could be much closer. Or, this porn, gaming and social media generation just might return to its somnolence of silly trivialities in convenient cynical apathy, while a political coup occurs. 

However, if the U.S. implodes in civil discord, does the rest of the world really want to be so dependent on American resources, which will then be subject to internal sabotage?

 

 

Welcome to the USSA (Footnote 1)

From my earliest youth, I held excessive zeal for liberty. And thus, the Revolutionary Land of the Free to our south and the political principles by which such liberty was constructed, had always attracted me. I detested the faint residue of conservative Loyalist and Monarchist sentiment still persisting in the mid-1960s. It represented a mildly psychic oppression. During the 1967 Centennial Year, I sang with Bobby Gimby for the Queen as part of a ragtag children’s choir at Centennial Stadium in Etobicoke. I recall thinking, at 9 years old, how much of a hypocrite I was, considering that I detested the pompous falsity and pretentious decorum of the Monarchy and Imperial British sentiment.

Canadian history was a bore. While national America was fashioned out of ideas in salons, national Canada was forged out of self-interests at a business meeting. This nation has failed to contribute any unique and useful political idea or perspective to world civilization. Thus, while I was never taken in by any civic religion to speak of in this hotel room, we call Canada; I must confess that the American civic religion held powerful sway (and blighted clarity of thought) until George W. Bush completely eviscerated any remaining delusions.

But the America of my dream had really suffered its death knell with the assassination of Lincoln and the rise of the first Gilded Age. It had hitherto been a nation, largely dedicated to the commonweal by consent; in which the common man deferred to no one, to the chagrin of European aristocratic observers. I am under no illusion that it was paradise on earth or that it was bereft of its own set of travesty and atrocity. However, it retained soul and vitality, amassing an inheritance of social capital that would take over a century to completely deplete. Ronald Reagan’s ‘City on a Hill’ represented that last gasp of nostalgia for an America that was.

Because what happens in the U.S. has such huge repercussions in the rest of the West, I recall opinionating in the mid-2000s that I would have impeached Bush Jr. for deception concerning entry into the Iraq War (2003). Even as sort-of-conservative-minded orthodox Evangelical, I recall arguing against a whole family of neo-Cons, social and small-c conservatives in the Christmas period of 2004/5 about the folly of that war. I asserted that the U.S. was entering into an Islamic version of Yugoslavia; ostensibly imposing liberal democracy upon people with an underlying ideology which is irreconcilable and existentially threatened by Western thought and institutions. The Americans would retreat with tails between their legs, leaving a fragile Iraqi government, presiding over a bloodily divided nation, waiting for the next Saddam Hussein to restore a coercive unity. Meanwhile, America would have lost complete moral authority; only able to keep Pax Americana by raw force alone; thereby requiring higher exactions of its own blood and treasure than when it is perceived the imperial power is governing, to some extent, for the benefit of all. That prediction is almost fully complete.

Nevertheless, as the lesser of two evils, I would still have voted for Bush in 2004.  There is something terribly wrong with this picture!

In the aftermath of his term, I concluded that George W. Bush had been the worst president since James Buchanan (1857-1861). And I expected that Obama would be worst still; back-to-back political calamities. But Obama has exceeded expectations on that count. For, if George Walker Bush was a buffoon; Barack Hussein Obama is a barbarian. Rather than James Buchanan, one must go back to the foreign English parliament serving King George III for comparison with Obama.

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The prudence of the Founding Fathers and the generations immediately preceding and following, noted threats on both sides of any narrow path or orbit. And thus they sought to maintain civil and social peace by balancing government against itself and balancing government against the medley of private interests, ideologies and factions within society.

Since then, one political party has since Woodrow Wilson completely repudiated the prudence of the Founding Fathers; believing in the goodness of humanity whose fault is occasionally intellectual incompetence. Thus, a large and encroaching state is pursued. And the arrogance of that faction is constantly imposed upon all others. The other political party has sought to return to the letter of the original Constitution, not realizing that it was merely a Montesquieun political device to balance the apparent social forces of their times. But concentration of private wealth/power becomes itself a tyrannical threat in a minimalist government. Thus, the changing dynamics of the 19^th and 20^th Century requires constant amending to reflect those altering realities.

But we dwell in an era of the simple-minded; who react to one threat in pendular and singular extremes; without concern for balance. Unmitigated security is pursued against the haphazard threats of largely private enemies; ignoring the insecurity against the person and nation, posed by unmitigated power of the state and state bureaucracies.

But large nations and civilizations do not fall, merely because of the loss of one battle or the collapse of tall buildings. The Roman city state with its Latin allies survived in cohesion, after ten years of Hannibal’s ravaging the Italian peninsula, while a much larger Empire had so rotted within, that barbarians with much smaller populations and resources finally swarmed it in the 5^th Century.

Islamic terrorists might constitute a chaotic threat to individual safety. But they are not, in themselves, a threat to the survival of the nation. Indeed, they pose a much smaller threat to individual safety than the 15,000 murders each year or fatalities due to vehicular accidents. Get a grip people! The overreaching and increasing tyrannical power of the bureaucratic state, given much impetus in these last dozen years, is a far greater threat to individual safety and security and ultimately to the survival and welfare of the American nation.

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With wholesale recording of virtually every electronic transaction (voice, email, credit card, web, chat) in a society whose livelihood and lifestyle requires considerable interaction with a virtual world; one wonders what remaining unreasonable search and seizure provisions of the Constitution are left, which U.S. Administrations could violate.

Really! Modest encroachments to privacy, Mr. President! Such a suggestion can only be a product of a consummate comedian or truly defective mind. If this was a Third Amendment infraction (quartering of soldiers in private homes), a modest encroachment in Obama’s mind would be the right for soldiers to sleep naked in the same bed as the daughters of the household; as long as it didn’t involve penetration.

Dragnets of metadata can easily provide sufficient red flags for further fishing; especially in the disingenuity of interpretations of what constitutes threat. and surely, if it easy enough to shop around for a sympathetic and/or compliant judge to obtain a blanket general warrant, how hard should it be to get judicial approval to open the package of any flagged individual item.

We witness these public officials and their courtiers, dismissing the potential dangers against civil rights infractions, totalitarianism and tyranny as alarmist; just as they did in my youth in my country. I recall the mantra. “Surely, one has nothing to worry about if one hasn’t done anything wrong.” The problem with such drivel is that it presumes upon the virtue of the public guardians.

Vice is inherent and universal in humanity. The passing of a civil service exam, or hair-brained psychological profile tests or acceptance into public service does not transform that same private individual, prone to self-interest and vice, into paragons of virtue and wisdom. Indeed, as unscrupulous opportunists survey the sociopolitical landscape, they will be times when ‘public service’ serves as the best means for feathering their own nest; through the organs of government than apart from it; as the shrewd operators of the late Roman Empire can attest

It is ironic that the NSA and PRISM revelations followed so soon on the heels of the chilling surveillance and harassment of journalists; or the preferential EPA and IRS treatment of one sociopolitical faction over the other; or the egregious leakage of records of donators to the National Organization for Marriage by IRS officials in California during the Proposition 8 referendum, so that opponents could threaten the livelihoods of employer and employees who disagreed with them. This is the stuff that begets civil war!

So it is not merely about the potential of providing “All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need, Courtesy of Bush and Obama”². Violations of constitutional protections are already presently exploited. The current administration might consider those who visit web sites about the Constitution, marriage or the history of English civil rights more of a threat to national security or the welfare of society and state. But perhaps a future administration, which represents the opposite sociopolitical faction, might deem those who frequent the porn and polyamory pages or donators to the ACLU or Planned Parenthood, to be more of a menace. Americans should be more concerned presently with the organs of the state apparatus being exploited as civic weapons in culture wars than with a theoretical tyranny.

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Last year (February 14, 2012), Canada had a similar concern crop up with the aborted attempt to pass the so-called “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act” (Bill C-30).

The bill would have granted authorities new powers to monitor and track the digital activities of Canadians in real-time, required service providers to log information about their customers and turn it over if requested, and made back door entrances mandatory allowing remote access of individuals’ electronic information, each without needing a warrant. Documents obtained under the Access to Information Act show that the government desired to use the expanded powers in cases not involving criminality.³

Although, the legislation spoke nothing about pedophiles, the Harper government felt is useful to alarm their conservative base with this misdirection. We could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers”. However, I was part of that base; as is arch-conservative Lorne Gunter.

Politicians or police will talk themselves into the wisdom of using the same technology to find tax cheats, divorced parents falling behind on child support or even human-rights violators […] What if you’re a member of a faith that believes homosexuality is a sin and you send out emails arguing against gay marriage or gay adoption and you use language that is a little too strong? Or maybe you’re having your basement renovated and you boast to a friend that you’re avoiding the HST by paying cash — should that send off an alarm at the Canada Revenue Agency?⁴

In my youth, Conservatives were complicit conspirators with Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s War Measures Act of 1970; a legislative mallet to swat a relative fly. It made martyrs of those political prisoners imprisoned for many months without warrant or charge. It discredited the ideals of individual civil rights in Quebec, hitherto promoted by the federal authorities. And it led to the first separatist PQ government in 1976.

Bill C-30 was withdrawn after much opposition by all factions in this country. And thus, how strange and ironic that the so-called “Land of the Free” has now become the more oppressive; and my native country, which I felt had proved too dismissive of civil liberty, has a little more sensibility and backbone than I remember in my youth. It is not that Canada hasn’t also increasingly lost the important liberties to an all-encroaching state. It is just that the military-industrial complex of our southern neighbour has deteriorated all that much faster.

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The secular delusion that America is a city on a hill, beaming an example to the world, is exposed to have now become a fraud. The present folly that exists there points more toward a trajectory of the black hole of Calcutta; of extreme vitriolic polarization with the collapse of the ideological middle; of extreme economic disparity (with ensuing social, legal and political injustices) with the collapse of the middle class; of loss of economic opportunity, even economic growth as consequence; of an astonishingly incompetent and foolish fiscal and monetary policy which can only lead to another financial asset meltdown, albeit with no further ability to ameliorate; even to a currency crisis. Bush and Obama have indeed provided the infrastructure for future tyranny and destruction of a free civic polity. And real and substantive causes already exist, which give reason for such a totalitarian autocracy to emerge.

I have read many comments on U.S. message boards, which perceive that to correct this devolution toward the totalitarian, tyrannical surveillance state; it will require civil insurrection and bloodshed. Unlike their ancestors however, I don’t think there exists in America, the moral fiber and civic courage to seriously challenge the oligarchic sociopolitical priesthood of both Republican and Democratic parties and their benefactors. The muted opposition to the TSA depredations of physical modesty proved that case. And it would require a rational and coherent political philosophy, which attracted both mutually suspicious wings of the sociopolitical continuum. And most citizens…er subjects will, after being momentarily irritated from their stupor of silly trivialities and confronted by truth, will return to their porn, gaming and social media after voicing their half-hearted and perfunctory outrage.

And thus I lament for the loss of liberty; not only in the Land of the Free; but also for every other jurisdiction in the world. The arrogant hyenas of tyrannical busybodies will have defeated the Lioness. Everything from then on will just be a mopping operation.

Even if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.⁵

And it cannot be lost on all those outside of American jurisdiction that Americans are only concerned about their own liberties, while the rest should be subject to their surveillance. Whenever, a dissident foreign critic was becoming too unwieldy to American interests, these officials could find a way to discredit or harass him/her by fair means or foul. I doubt that this xenophobic imperialist nation has even considered the blowback from that corollary consequence.

 

 NOTES

 

1.      With special thanks to a commentator with pseudonym akpat for the title, from article Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program, Washington Post, June 6, 2013, Accessed http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html on June 9, 2013.

2.       Conor Friedersdorf, “All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need, Courtesy of Bush and Obama”, The Atlantic Monthly, June 7, 2013. Accessed http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/all-the-infrastructure-a-tyrant-would-need-courtesy-of-bush-and-obama/276635/ on June 9, 2013.

3.       Wikipedia, Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, Accessed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Children_from_Internet_Predators_Act on June 9, 2013.

4.       Lorne Gunter, “Want to read my email, Vic Toews? Get a warrant”, The National Post, February 17, 2013, Accessed http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/02/17/lorne-gunter-want-to-read-my-email-get-a-warrant/ on June 9, 2013.

5.       Glenn Greenwald, “Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations” (transcript of interview)”, The Guardian, June 9, 2013, accessed http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance on June 9, 2013.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Protagorean Arrogance

I often make reference to a stock phrase protagorean arrogance to describe feminist perspectives. The purpose is less to insult than to explain. The notion emanates from observation and excruciating personal experience; whereby one’s interlocutor is so locked up in their subjective mantras that no amount of valid reasoning or evidence can genuinely dislodge them from their pre-existing opinions, even one iota. However, the danger from such persons lurks in their tyrannical impulses, “sincerely exercised for the good of its victims” and “who torment us for our own good, [who] will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience”.¹ New York Mayor and plutocrat “Big Gulp” Bloomberg comes to mind. They are the enemies of liberty of conscience, the progenitors of ideological and social tyranny, and the begetters of civil wars, from family relationships up to civil societies. For, it is not in differences of opinion that most civic conflagration arises; but when one or all factions seek to impose their worldview and ethic/ethos upon all others.

Protagorean derives from the Greek sophist Protagoras of Abdera (490 – 420 B.C.), who is made famous by his utterance “Man is the measure of all things”.  This radical relativistic notion, that objective reality and the Good is determined by our epistemological ability to ascertain it, was seen in its time as leading to moral/legal chaos and societal disintegration. The astute will also surmise that the ultimate sociopolitical end result of such thought will be civil governance by arbitrary coercion of pure power instead of through consent. The autocracies of Alexander’s and the Roman Empire are artifacts one and two for the prosecutor for such conclusions.

It should not be thought that feminists are the only culprits of this disposition.

In this narcissistic, subjectivist age, the adage has morphed into I am the measure of all things. In a discourse of a generation back, the interlocutor who disagreed with you might declare a Kierkegaardian sentiment that what is true for you is not [necessarily] true for me. Nowadays, that same disagreeing interlocutor will tend to subscribe to the view that since what you say isn’t convincing to them; it is not true for you neither. Consequently, instead of acknowledging liberty of conscience differences of opinion, these interlocutors must coerce others to their way of conduct or thought.

Same-sex proponents operate in this way. It is not sufficient that they live their relationships and call them and others to call it whatever they please. Behind the movement is this intention to isolate and marginalize their ideological and sociopolitical adversaries and coerce these others to publicly concur with their politically correct cant through threat of subtle legal and socioeconomic reprisals.

However, the more insidious kind of protagorean arrogance is that which emanates without deliberate intent to deceive. Same-sex advocates probably know that they are pushing the envelope against liberty of conscience to the extent that they can get away with, until they meet rock hard resistance and push back. The evil of protagorean arrogance is that in the unwitting unknowing, these Lilliputian zealots lack any boundaries in violating the rights of others. They will not likely stand down.

I bear witness of this tyrannical impulse. A fifty-something grandmother constantly questions and countermands her daughter’s instructions and discipline of the daughter’s daughter in the presence of the latter. It would often take the opprobrium and intervention of the wider family to arrest this busybody from publicly undercutting the authority of the daughter. However, when that opprobrium and intervention was less present, the grandmother would resort to her old tricks. The matriarch’s self-righteous certainty trumps the rightful authority of others to govern their own lives and those of their wards.

Having been herself a mother at one time, one would have thought that the grandmother would have innate appreciation of a parent’s desire and right to steward their own child. And there are times, when the situation is of such severe nature and clearly pre-defined to warrant intervention. If however, every minutiae of difference of opinion becomes a federal issue, it indicates that the protagorean arrogance borders on both the lawless and the tyrannical.

This psychosocial phenomenon is highlighted to explain an astonishing lack of psychological insight by modern women; feminists in particular. Some have convinced themselves that the differences between the sexes are mere social constructs (Second Wave Feminists). Men really ought to be thinking like women. And if males don’t; from the protagorean vantage point of such women, it must derive from an ethical deficiency rather than a gender-based proclivity to approach existence from a different vantage point. Alternatively, there are the Third Wave Gender Nationalists, who acknowledge that differences in gender proclivities exist, but that the attributes of their side are superior to that of the other.

Thus, like Hitler’s Youth, they must indoctrinate and ideologically emasculate boys to the superiority of feminine traits even before they become men. They deem themselves alone as being competent enough to define and arbitrate the nature of masculinity; which often amounts to little more than servicing women’s every need and fetish, just like in their romantic novels. Such will deign to denigrate the masculinity in masculinity. As evidenced in the Slut Walks, such believe that they should be free to trample on the sensitivities of others and to encumbrance all others. Others must rearrange their lives so to accommodate these sluts alone. For, they alone are right. The cosmos is neither geocentric nor heliocentric. Nay. The cosmos orbits around their itsy bitsy opinions and interests.

And the lack of psychological insight is blinding them from perceiving the encroaching and overwhelming social counter-reaction by new generations of young males. While the obtuse Hanna Rosin is declaring a triumphalist feminine victory in “The End of Men”; I see a different dynamic, bubbling up from the ground up and terrifying to the status of women in the generations to come.

The pertinent point is the obliviousness in these women’s lack of psychological insight; the arrogance in this unreasoning stupidity. It doesn’t seem to occur to such persons that the real Truth is somewhere out there, to which they themselves are not likely to have ownership, to which they like all others must strive. Or that their gender counterparts might be a necessary counterbalance to the excesses of their gender proclivities; as would be the case of female proclivities mitigating male excesses.

©Copyright John Hutchinson

NOTES

¹C.S. Lewis, The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, The Twentieth Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, 3(3), 1949, p 5-12.

The Coming Persecution in America: Paul Washer

That a great persecution of existing Christians in the West, including the U.S. will occur, I have not doubt. A fabulist, pre-Tribulation Rapture requires fantastic elasticity of Biblical interpretation to mould this fanciful speculation into doctrinal orthodoxy. It coagulates from pockets of Scriptural mist, more vaporous than those justifying the ever-virginal quality of Mary, the mother of Jesus’ brothers and sisters (Matthew 13:55). Even the Mormon doctrine of baptizing for the dead has clearer outlines of justification (1 Corinthians 15:29); even if there exists only one verse, which gives that birth.

It is not an issue of whether there will a resurrection of the dead and rising of those living, when Christ appears. It is a question of chronology and number of Second Comings. It is a question of fidelity to an interpretative key in Scriptures; that a doctrine can be garnered, only through a minimum of two or three clear Scriptural witnesses (2 Corinthians 13:1). I have read too much Christian history. I have observed too much irrationality, too many absurdities, travesties and atrocities, originating from the creative innovations of peasant seers and vainglorious theologians.

The fluff that is proffered to support this doctrinal contention defies integrity and rationality. Serious persecution of Christians is proliferating around the world. Tentative forays are occurring in Europe. Initial probes are occurring in Canada. It is astonishing Exceptionalist vanity that the American Church should avoid that which 95% of the world is experiencing.

Nevertheless, even if one holds the pre-Tribulation Rapture position, it might be prudent not to hold the position too tenaciously. If it comes to pass, well and good. But if it does not come to pass, one might not be prepared for that any “hell that’s going to break loose on us”. If the doctrine has vaporous foundations; the basis for any anathemas against those who doubt it floats in total ether. Requirement of that belief in order to be a Christian and even for church membership, adds “mental works” to faith in Christ.

Where I might detour from Paul Washer’s warning, involves perhaps speculative eschatology and sociological prophecy in the light of political theory, psychology, history and Scriptures. I don’t have, at all, a bad record in this sideline. I would not dare consider myself a prophet of Biblical proportions. But while some Southern Baptist radio station owner is astonished at recent turn of events about same-sex rights, one of my essays in Grade 13 journalism class (1977-8), saw the writing on the wall on the coattails of the Black civil rights movement. This is a good decade before the self-interested Andrew Sullivan was given credit for that prediction.

Abdication of Duty: Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

The Presidential Oath of Office (U.S. Constitution – Article II, Section 1)

On February 23, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder sent a memorandum to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, John A. Boehner, informing him that President Obama’s administration “will no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman”. I consider any decision to refuse to give full, proper and vigorous representation to defend all laws of the land in accordance to the sworn duties of office, to be an impeachable offense. This severe indictment has nothing to do with the gay rights issue. Rather, in the name of this issue, this administration has proceeded to violate an elementary principle of civics; which because it concerns a highly public issue, will likely invoke worse ramifications in the ensuing years.

However, before making the argument, a couple of necessary disclaimers are required. As noted elsewhere on this web site (The Problem of Gay Marriage), I consider it unwise for the state to have made or make any definition for marriage or to involve itself so extensively in legislative or judicial regulation of the Estate. Such involvement has always led to travesties and injustice of various sorts (Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act – 1753 relating to religion and age, Anti-miscegenation laws, eugenic-associated marriage laws). The benefits to the state of such laws are far outweighed by the risks to civil unrest on a matter in this day. There are guaranteed losers upon making any public definition on marriage. Either perceived violations against equality or violations against conscience will invariably suffer. And it will just add one more item to the litany of flashpoints in a culture war which will increasingly heat up in waves until its climax.

Secondly, although I might consider myself a moderate conservative, the best description of the increasingly polarized factions in the U.S. is encapsulated by The Doors. “And All the Children Are Insane” (“The End” –  1967). I would find it difficult, in good conscience, to vote for either side, even were I able. I considered the deceit of the Bush Administration concerning WMDs in Iraq, which was the purported justification to obtain public support for initiating and conducting a foolish war, to be also grounds for impeachment. Surely, if Puritanical prosecutors can beat the bushes to induce a few lies about minor scandals and abuse of power in the Clinton years, surely a whopper weave of deceit and lies such as the WMD deserves a prosecutor or two. Thus, I am an equal opportunity impeacher. And I consider the practice of de facto not forcing the law to the best of ability to be similar grounds for impeachment.

When I heard about this decision last year, the memory of the last years of the Wiemar Republic and early years of the Nazi regime came to mind. Though laws were on the books, the cops, sympathetic to right-wing and Nazi sentiments, failed to enforce the law and protect the Jewish and other minorities from thuggery as well as pick sides in riots between the Nazis and the Communists.

This issue bumped up into consciousness again last week when encountering a report concerning similar neglects of duty by Greek bureaucrats, judiciaries and cops against immigrants, minorities and political enemies without police intervention. The issue is relevant in the contemporary political setting.

For example, immigrants were first demonized by the state itself. They were interned, and their rights were cancelled in practice. Bureaucrats failed to enforce protective labour legislation. The police and the judiciary do not prosecute fascists under existing laws, which are more or less adequate, and don’t penalize racial attacks, antisemitism and spreading of hate, all trademarks of Golden Dawn.

Golden Dawn and the Rise of Fascism, The Guardian, June 19, 2012

If one faction or the other side, decides, for whatever excuse it gives itself, not to defend a duly initiated law, which in this case had acquired overwhelming support in both U.S. Congressional Houses and the executive branch; it is akin to doing to law what would occur to a charged defendant in which no lawyer would defend nor be appointed. In an already unjust judicial system, where money buys the best sophists, the dynamics of this refusal to uphold the laws of the land, on the basis of self-appointed interpretation of the law in reference to the Constitution, lends to practicable tilting of the balance of justice.

However, the great peril lies in this. It sets precedent, by which either side can effectually nullify any law that they dislike through not giving full defense of it. Certainly, the rabble rousers and the single-minded zealots within each faction may denigrate the issue of rule of law or procedural niceties of the political process, in the name of their concept of a “higher principle”. Such zealots, animated with only myopic self-interest and without principle, will not appreciate the a graver threat lies in lawlessness, even to their own long-term interests. Instigating a principle of capriciously setting aside full defense of any given law, whenever the mood strikes, soon proliferates into a habit by whichever faction acquires the Commanding Heights of sociopolitical power. Surely, the adversaries of the Obama Administration will simply retaliate when power returns to their hands, having been given full justification by precedent. And such precedents have tendency to proliferate with even more flimsier basis than those provided in this incident. The complaint by the losing liberal parties of the Weimar Republic at Hitler’s use of the anti-hate laws to suppress free expression, was legitimately cast in these liberals’ faces.

The long term consequences could include a deepening detestation of each other faction as each perceive the other as violating law and equity to pursue their own self-interests and agendas. A government of laws could hereby easily descend into a government of raw power. Free civil institutions and government will be effectually overthrown. Herein, in this most basic of civic principles, the current Obama administration shows itself to be incompetent and foolish.

Ramifications of the 2012 U.S. Federal Election: A New Manifestation of Social Schisms: Race

The Presidential U.S. Election of 2012 exposed another emerging and dangerous schism in that nation. In addition to cultural and class wars, we must add that of race or tribe. In a nation, whereby those of European ethnicity handed a landslide trouncing to the incumbent black president (39% versus 59%), the wishes of this 63.4% of the population and 72% of the electorate, was overturned by an even greater margin amongst its ethnic minorities.¹ It was a repeat of the 2008 election but with intensification of the tribal schisms. In 2008, the overturning of a sizable majority white vote (43% – 55%) could be understood in the context of a disastrous preceding presidency.² However, in that the current administration has been equally incompetent; those rationalizations wear very thin, this go-around. For many who supported him, Obama might be a disaster. But he is our boy!

The fact that 93 – 95% of the black electorate voted for one of their skin coloration destroys the last vestige of the noble “I Have a Dream” legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. It is apparent that the dream “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” need only apply to that tribe’s adversaries. The moral credibility of that sentiment has been undermined by the extreme tribalism of King’s own tribe. And in loose sociopolitical adaptation of Newton’s Third Law of Motion; “To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction”; it is the inevitability of human nature that a corresponding subterranean movement of an intensifying Caucasian ‘closing of the ranks’ will ensue in response. This is not a dynamic peculiar to the United States. The intensifying racial/cultural divide, which has spawned radical nativist and even Fascist movements in Europe, is testimony to this modern rendition of an ancient, enduring and universal reality.

However, hardening endemic racial attitudes are less causative to the racial divides. Rather, these are incidental consequences of the other schisms. This is not to suggest racism on both sides has not resurged; as attested by silly conspiratorial theories, like those trumpeted by Donald Trump (i.e. Birthers).

Rather, America’s minorities are of a radically different cultural mindset to the traditional American heritage. The socioeconomic environment in which such minorities find themselves is conducive to rejecting the civic religion of that tradition. And though less causative; this radical difference and rejection will spawn a racial manifestation by those who see these minorities as palpable threats to that traditional ethic, an ethic, which is believed as having made America great. And in being superseded by another ethic, America is perceived threatened with diminishing and devastation. In this, a future resurgence of racism would be more powerful and intractable because of more credible foundations than those of the past.

Regardless of all other elements of this racial alienation, ‘white’ traditional America is suffering political blowback for its failure to address the economic disparity and ensuing loss of mobility; to which visible minorities are palpably visible. In short vacations to the Eastern seaboard in the last decade or so; even though I was aware of stronger racial divisions in the U.S. than at home, I was stunned to the extent by which visible minorities act as the economic underclass.

Both political factions have failed in this regard. The traditional Right continues to preach a ‘lift oneself by one’s boot straps’ self-righteous capitalist ethic in the face of a playing field that has become inordinately tilted. The traditional Left has placated the less fortunate with ‘bread and circuses’ entitlements, which calcify the underclass into permanency. However, from the partisan perspective of the Right, the onus is upon them to resolve the extreme disparities in income and wealth. Politically, the short-term prospects of the Left are good, by merely middling through with the status quo.

 Endnotes:

1. Edison Research as reported by (Lydia Warrant) Daily Mail U.K., “Record number of Hispanic and Asian voters head to the polls to help Obama secure second term – as his support among whites plummets”, November 7, 2012, (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2229225/Presidential-election-2012-Record-number-Hispanic-voters-head-polls.html),  November 6, 2012 Exit Polls (25,565 voters included 4,408 early/absentee voters contacted Oct 29 – Nov 4, 2012).
2. Edison Research, November 4, 2012 Exit Polls (18,012 voters included 2,378 early/absentee respondents contacted October 24-November 2, 2008. http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/elections/how_groups_voted/voted_08.html#.UKkkVGe8GSo

Philosophical Sectarianism

In order to inoculate and neutralize religious sectarianism, strife and tyranny from overflowing onto the public sphere; with consequential travesty, atrocity and devastation; a political formula was adopted seeking to ensure pluralism of religious worldviews, ethics and ethos. Although a good in itself, from an individual standpoint; the motivations behind this proposition were primarily meant to neuter the ability of one form of factionalism from undermining the survival and welfare of free civil societies. The concern of the American Founding Fathers about the insidious and deleterious effects of faction upon civil government was profoundly expressed throughout their writings; from the Federalist Papers to Washington’s Farewell Address.

Classical education informs us of the recurring civic convulsions of Greek city states between aristocratic and democratic factions; of the Roman Republic’s implosion, resulting from class warfare and the culture wars between the old Republican guard and upstart Hellenized Romans; or of the enervating effects of national division between orthodox and Hellenized Jewish factions, as they contested against Greek and Roman imperialists from the Maccabeans to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The specter of the 16^th and 17^th Century religious wars, culminating in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), whereby one third of Germany’s (Holy Roman Empire’s) population lost their lives and its landscape was devastated, still haunted. America was initially populated by Europe’s oppressed religious ‘losers’ in the religiopolitical squabbles of those preceding centuries.

The American constitution attempted to ameliorate the effects of the faction of self-interests; the First Amendment to nullify the effects of the faction of ideology.

The Founding Fathers adopted the formula: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”:  as the legal device by which this ideological pluralism would be achieved. It was not that the concept of “separation of state and church” was unknown before Jefferson’s famous letter to the Danbury Baptists. A variation on that same theme was expressed as far back as 1644 by Baptist theologian and Rhode Island statesman, Roger Williams. “[A] hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world” was an iconic expression of the political sentiments that emanated from the 16^th Century Anabaptist tradition.

However, the Founding Fathers rejected that formulation. The formula that was adopted may have been a compromise between the Federalist (i.e. Washington and Adams) and Democratic-Republican (i.e. Jefferson and Madison) wings; going by other artifacts and writings of the times. The Federalist conception of the limits of religious establishment differed from the Jeffersonian-Madisonian; the former seeking only to restrict proper church institutions. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 which governed the mid-west territories until their statehood; explicitly permitted religious instruction in the public schools. The latter, demonstrated by Jefferson’s and Madison’s advocacies in Virginia, sought to adopt a form of European laïcité; whereby religious worldviews would be effectually eliminated from the public domain including the schools.

Separation of church and state, which has increasingly become the guiding interpretation the world over governing such relations, is a flawed concept. The more “high and impregnable” and “absolute” that wall is, the more irrational and absurd. For instance: unless the state intends to leave the Catholic Church to judge its own sexual pedophile predators, in accordance with an absolute divorce of jurisdictions, those who advocate such laïcité cannot but be inconsistent with their principle. The effectual consequence of this laïcité denies the influence of the religious in the public domain, while at the same time; ‘pragmatism’ demands public oversight of religious institutions and individuals. Logically, laïcité means not separation of church and state; but subordination of church under state in a slow meandering eventuality to reach what existed in the French Revolution (The Civil Constitution of the Clergy) or in Communist states.

So long as the scope of powers of government is circumscribed; so long as there is a common moral ethic, although underlying secularist metanarratives do not support a Christian ethic; the principle of separation of church and state doesn’t cause undue hardship. What wasn’t conceivable in the minds of the progenitors of this precept of separation of church and state was the prospect that large swaths of the population could ever entertain an agnostic / atheistic / antitheistic stance. North America might be nominally Christian (CINO). However, the conventional wisdoms that prevail, particularly at the official and elite level, are significantly secularist and materialist in nature. It was a failure of imagination, especially in light of known historical fact that the Hellenist and Roman ruling elite were religious in name only. “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful” (Seneca).

Western liberal judiciaries have exploited the concept of separation of church and state to preclude and exclude even rationally argued spiritually-derived values and the concerns of theists from the public domain. Thus, what was intended to inoculate Western societies from sectarianism of a theological nature has ironically opened up a much greater and graver sectarianism of a philosophical nature; between sacralists who subscribe to a theistic universe and secularists who subscribe to a materialist and naturalist universe. The application and misapplication of the separation of church and state interpretation is producing the very sociopolitical conditions it was meant to avoid.

It is not the fine points of philosophical debate that drives the cultural and civilizational acrimony and wars. Rather, it is the implementation and coercion of these ideas. It is the social opprobrium that translates into the punishment of the consciences of ideological adversaries, including the incurring of economic loss and disadvantage (i.e. candidate inadmissibility in public related jobs). It is judicial, bureaucratic and political officials attempt to compel, by threat of fines and incarcerations, those individuals and groups who belong to a different ethic and ethos and who find the official ethic distasteful, stupid, foolish and even wicked. Philosophical sectarianism, no less than religious sectarianism, produces a resentful class of second-class citizens; a dangerously acrimonious social and political environment well described by George Washington over two centuries ago.

However, the secularist, cosmopolitan elite are as deaf as the Tsar. Believing or disingenuously propagating the self-serving deception that their beliefs are incontrovertibly verified in reason, fact and science; their intellectual arrogance attempts to impose an ethic and ethos upon all. However, the premises of the secularist, naturalist, rationalist, nihilist and materialist are unproven, irrational and cannot stand up to critical scrutiny. They constitute a constellation of tenets of an ancient Ionian metanarrative, a cosmological viewpoint, which is as complex as the religious systems they scorn. Their belief system is as untenable to the sacralist as the various sacralist worldviews are to these secularists. As Madison stated in his discourse on faction (Federalist Papers); “As long as the reason of man continues to be fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.” However, the complexity of these overarching theories make incontrovertible proof or disproof improbable; even if the adjudicator is honest and not looking for an intellectual cover for his own preferred manner of living.

In a previous age, when various Christian theologies held the Commanding Heights of society and government in their various jurisdictions; the Bible, the Catholic Magisterium and various Protestant Magisteriums (though they won’t admit to it) were believed to be so true, that common sense demanded that they be imposed onto all.

A theological discourse to demonstrate the invalidity of this proposition would bore most readers. Nevertheless, there has been a historical Evangelical understanding, though not faithfully and consistently practiced, that Christianity has no obligated duty to impose a Theonomist regime. “Let the blind lead the blind” (Matthew 15:14). It is not merely that different Christians (or other sacralists) will interpret the rather complicated and nuanced Scriptures differently (or the same Christian differently at different junctures of his same life). It is that even if one had perfect understanding of the Full Counsel of God, one had no more authority to impose his perfect understanding than God generally allows Himself to impose, except when He deems the moral rot of any given person or society to be too intolerable for the general welfare of humanity. The natural consequence of our actions ought to be our tutor. This has been the general gist of historical Evangelical thinking.

To what extent Christianity ought to be brought into the public square, poses deep conundrums. There are no hard and fast rules that New Testament Scriptures provides. However, one would not know this if one considered the history of Christendom. Wariness about a Christian commonwealth or conservative authoritarianism is as understandable and shared even by Francis Schaeffer as that of a liberal statist social totalitarianism.

Modern secularists, or most forms of them, have merely become a different form of fundamentalist; transferring the basis to impose and coerce their values from the Word of God or some derivative thereof, to the tyranny of reason; their reason; or an epistemological approach to truth (science) which suffers from many of the same fallibilities and shortcomings as are found in other epistemological approaches to truth. How useful is peer review in a discipline and among practitioners, governed more by philosophical dogma than by established and incontrovertible proof; or one that is susceptible to internal and/or external political and economic pressures and interference?

The absurdity of the reign of Reason becomes quickly apparent if one gives consideration to the largely secular philosophical battles between the different schools of the ancient Greek academies. Whose ‘reason’ should rule? The absurdity also manifests itself in the philosophical winds and scientific theories that have come and gone through the revolving door of history

Even the nihilists and cultural and moral relativists are guilty of secular fundamentalism in their Cult of Tolerance; with a hilarious dose of hypocritical inconsistency to boot. Perfect tolerance logically demands the tolerance of the intolerant; not to impose your non-committal to truth upon those who are committed to some version of truth. However, it is not reason and science that really governs most souls of men. They want what they want. Reason and ideology generally serve as intellectual and moral cover for self-interest.

The secularist, cosmopolitan elite are as deaf as the Tsar. Some still believe in the myth of a liberating Secularist Triumphalism over the theocrats and sacred texts; as simple-minded and sophomoric a conception of history as those constructed by Adolph Hitler and Ayn Rand. Others believe that their current hold over almost all the organs of societal and political power, they can withstand and contain the fury of their ideological adversaries. In this, they are historical illiterates.

The two broad sweeps of philosophical thought, between naturalist and theist, are contending for the Commanding Heights of society; perhaps everywhere; but most acutely and evidently in the U.S. These broad metanarratives provide the waters that perennially nourish and refresh all the acrimonious socioeconomic and political issues in contention. But, it is not the ideas themselves that threaten social cohesion and peace. Rather, it is in the foolhardy arrogance of one side or the other, coercing the other through soft and hard totalitarian measures. It is the unwillingness to bend backwards to accommodate the both sides to live their affairs largely free of external interference and without direct and indirect economic detriment. It is the preclusion from the public square, the opinions of the other on the basis of some self-serving criteria. The American Founding Fathers had given due warning to the consequences of faction. We have been obliviously sleepwalking to the scenarios they described and feared.