Monday, June 04, 2018




Arbitrary arrests of foes of jihad terror herald the end of Britain as a free society

Two recent arrests in Britain could serve as its epitaph

The first, as captured in this video, was that of a middle-aged woman named Amy who was arrested on Wednesday at her home. Amy herself began filming with her phone as police demanded that she let them in. When Amy asked them whether she was going to be arrested and asked them what the charge was, they refused to answer, and simply repeated their demand that she let them in, threatening to break down the door if she didn’t.

Watching the video, one shares Amy’s confusion and fear at being confronted by police at her door at nine o’clock in the morning. Then when she does open the door, she is told she is under arrest. A young male policeman bellows, “Do not resist us!” He and his female partner roughly handcuff Amy and lead her away.

Last month, Amy confronted London police in Hyde Park – as you can see in this video -- where Muslims were placing down their prayer mats on the walkways and conducting public prayer. She pointed out to them that it was against the law to hold public prayers in parks, but police responded only with obfuscation and indifference.

Amy wasn’t arrested, however, for embarrassing the London police. At least not officially. As you can see from yet another video, she was arrested for “homophobia,” not “Islamophobia,” in a highly questionable case. Apparently she said “Have a gay day” to a gay rights activist who confronted her, and is being charged with assault for pushing him away.

The assault charge, however, given that Amy is hardly an imposing physical presence and walks with a cane, is absurd and obviously trumped-up. Amy’s arrest seems to indicate that British police are now arresting people for saying the wrong thing or having unacceptable opinions. It appears as if Britain is now fully a police state, in which people can be arrested and brutalized on nebulous “hate” charges, and have no rights, no recourse.

With Theresa May’s government being as Sharia-compliant as it is, it is entirely possible that Amy was targeted also for reminding police of the law forbidding public prayer in parks, or for “Islamophobia” in general — or if she wasn’t, such arrests are coming, and coming soon, as indicated by the arrest on Friday of activist Tommy Robinson.

Robinson was standing outside the courthouse where a trial of a Muslim rape gang was taking place, discussing Britain’s rape gang crisis. Reporters stand outside courtrooms all the time and make videos; Tommy wasn’t doing anything that they don’t do. But he was suddenly arrested (as shown in this video) for “breaching the peace,” which is apparently British police code for “offending Islam.”

Britain is finished, and its death as a free society is by its own hand. These videos ought to shock the world and lead to an international denunciation of Britain’s slide into totalitarianism, and to calls for it to respect the human rights of all its citizens, not just Muslims. But they won’t, because Amy and Tommy are just “Islamophobes,” and so am I, and such people have no rights that the political and media elites feel bound to respect.

Future generations of free Britons, if there are any, will curse the name of Theresa May as the destroyer of free Britain. These videos chronicle its demise as a free society.

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WHY THE LEFT LOVES AND HATES SCIENCE

It’s not real science, it’s an infallibility cult.

“Why do you hate science?”

That’s the question leftists have taken to asking non-leftists. Leftists claim to love science, insofar as anyone can love a method for testing a hypothesis, and accuse their enemies of hating it.

How can anyone love or hate an indifferent set of techniques? And how can an ideology that believes technological civilization is destroying the planet really claim to love the science behind it?

But swap out “science” for “god” and the question, “Why do you hate science” makes perfect sense. So do the constant assertions of love for science. These aren’t scientific assertions, but religious ones.

Actual science doesn’t care whether you love or hate it. That’s not how you engage with the theory of relativity. But religion is measured by love and hate. Either you love a deity or you hate it.

No one loves or hates science. But they do love Scienticism.

Scienticism is science without skepticism. It takes the ideas of science and uses them to create an infallible belief system that gives our lives meaning and dictates how we should live those lives.

In other words, a religion.

Contrary to popular disbelief, a religion doesn’t need a god. It does need some things. A creation myth that explains our lives. An enlightened leadership. The conviction that every person’s actions matter. Redemption, salvation and damnation. Miracles. An imminent apocalypse. A prophesized golden age.

Scientism offers all these things and more. Its creation myths inevitably lead to philosophies about our place in the universe. Its miracles are technological. Its heroes have super powers or spaceships. Global warming is on its way to destroy us. And only recycling and green energy can save us from the climate apocalypse. Its truths are infallible because they are prophesized by PhD’s wielding hockey stick graphs.

Its god is Homo Progressivus, born an ape and ascending to singularity synthesis. Its heaven is a social services agency. Its saints died for social progress. And if you want angels, why not try UFOs?

But what about the devil? In the early days of Scientism, superstition was the great antagonist of modernity. Technological progress had made a new sort of civilization possible. And Scientism was born out of that thrilling encounter with the future. We no longer believed in confessing to clergy. Instead we had our minds scientifically psychoanalyzed by Freudians. The imminent apocalypse had nothing to do with heaven, but everything to do with the class conflicts of capitalism. Our legends would no longer be about the past, but the wonders of the future. Our enemy was the past, with its tradition and ignorance.

The past is dead.

Religion is vanishing in Europe and America is catching up. Morals are as outdated as phrenology. No one believes in the golden future anymore. Least of all the worshipers at the chrome altar of Scientism.

Scientism had created a god of endless progress. A collectivist human engine of innovation. Now it turned him into the devil. Like Zoroastrianism, Scientism became a dual religion of two gods.

One good and one evil.

The Ahriman of scientism builds nuclear power plants, drills for oil, drives an SUV, launches spaceships and shops with plastic grocery bags. Its Ahura Mazda rides a bike, saves trash for compost, eats locally farmed food (I recently passed a downtown Manhattan restaurant which promised that its food came exclusively from the local farms for which the island is renowned) and gets his power from the sun.

Scientism both worships and demonizes science. It loves and hates it. Its mission is to save us all from the ravages of science. And if you question this mission, you’re accused of hating science.

The Scientism of 1918 and 2018 are both snapshots of a philosophical schism that tore the left apart.

The 1918 left reviled the capitalist, but admired the collectivist order of his factory. Its vision was to turn all of society into a factory without a capitalist owner. Social problems would be solved by experts. Organizations would impose efficiency. Global governments would end war, hunger, and euthanize people with flawed genes. The priesthood of public service would replace the service of god.

The 2018 left reviles the factory. Its scientism is an ugly half-breed, half hippie and half technocrat. It’s convinced that science makes it superior. And equally convinced that science is a cold, sterile philosophy of dead white men that cuts us off from the true intensity of feeling of the noble savage and pothead. It romanticizes rural living, handicrafts and religions that behead their daughters. And then it retweets Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye to tell off those stupid science-hates who don’t believe science is destroying the planet. Don’t they realize that science has scientifically proven that science is evil?

Confused? So are they.

Technocracy, the factory model extended through the latest internet innovations and their philosophical afterbirths, is still at the heart of left. Despite its hippie affinity for local farms in Manhattan, trendy crafts, raw food and farmhouses in Vermont that no farmer can afford, it doesn’t actually want to move to a commune. Its urban and suburban efforts to mesh yuppie and hippie reflect a mixed-up culture.

And so the left wants us all to live in big cities and bike to work. It loves traveling on jet planes to get back to unspoiled nature. It can’t stop lecturing us on how much it loves science between its meditation classes and protest against nuclear power. It wants a government to use the latest technology to control every detail of our lives so that all the oppressed can finally be free.

Scienticism’s schizophrenia is due to the left trying to reconcile the factory and the commune in erratic and hypocritical ways. Its mind is with the factory, but its heart is in the commune. The technocratic system it’s inflicting on everyone uses false appeals to science as proof of its practical infallibility.

And that’s what the left always loved and truly loves about science.

Science gives it an unfounded sense of practical infallibility while its projected empathy gifts it with an even more unfounded moral infallibility. Between the two, the left is convinced that everything it does is bound to succeed and is the absolutely right thing to do. Even though history shows the exact opposite.

Every crackpot leftist theory from Marxism to Global Warming is cloaked in an inevitable something. The revolution of the working class can’t be stopped. The world is bound to run out of food, oil and sanctimony. The rise of the oceans can’t be stopped (except by electing Democrats). Science says so.

But science is the opposite of infallible. Its strength is its fallibility.

Science offers a crab walk forward, because it’s willing to admit and correct errors. But Scientism never admits it’s wrong. Instead it claims that scientific testing has found it absolutely true. Then it hides its data and tries to pass laws banning anyone from questioning its absurdly premature conclusions.

Scientism strips science of its greatest strength and builds a cargo cult around wearing a lab coat.

The left loathes real science because it hates skepticism. But it loves infallibility. And that is all that’s left of its science. What was once the soul of secularism, a belief system bestriding civilization, now exists solely to offer infallibility to whatever loathsome nonsense the left believes at any given moment.

The rest of utopia has melted into a slimy soup of machine politics, identity politics, elitist snobbery and random tantrums by the sort of unstable people that cults tend to attract like flies to roadkill.

The left doesn’t love science. It loves its own power.

Take anything else that the left claims to love or care about, replace it with those words and you’ll have the right answer. The left doesn’t care about black people, it cares about power. It doesn’t care about women, gays, Syria, recycling, offensive t-shirts, education or Gaza. It cares about power.

Scienticism is a cult of power. Its dualism of the god and devil of science battling each other is a philosophical breakdown which reconciles a schism within the left by offering it even more power.

The old Scienticism believed that our only god would be human progress. Then the new gods of the New Frontier and Great Society with their sociology degrees and colored charts stared into the mirror, they went into the counterculture and came back having found that they were not only gods, but devils.

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Veganism and the politics of purity

The rise of militant veganism reflects our misanthropic age.

The modern-day cult of veganism has been making its mark again. On Tuesday, it was reported that a family butchers in Kent has been threatened with petrol bombs in a campaign of intimidation by animal-rights activists. Demonstrators have been spraying ‘Stop Killing Animals. Go Vegan’ and daubing the logo of the Animal Liberation Front on the front of Marlow Butchers in Ashford.

The business has received dozens of threats, with one reading: ‘Chopping up the corpses of innocent animals and using their flesh for food is barbaric.’ This is no isolated incident. Attacks by vegan activists on small businesses are on the rise, according to the Countryside Alliance.

Elsewhere we read that ‘influencer’ vegan chefs and social-media stars, such as Ella Woodward and Stella Rae, have been bullied online by fundamentalist vegans who demand ‘perfect veganism’. Woodward’s ‘dirty’ transgression, for instance, has been to offer non-vegan food at her new restaurant, while the activist and chef Jack Monroe has been abused for letting her eight-year-old son cook a sausage casserole. When a photo of a paella dish from one of Monroe’s old cookbooks was posted online, Monroe’s Facebook page was ‘flooded with death threats and harassment within minutes’, according to Monroe.

Despite the fact that these celebrity names introduce and promote veganism as a viable lifestyle, this clearly isn’t enough for perfect vegans. They demand total purity above any long-term effectiveness of these chefs in spreading veganism.

You will recognise this peculiar set of priorities. In putting ideological purity above the goal of transforming society, perfect veganism resembles the Momentum movement. For both, purging the unclean is more important than changing the outside world. In many respects, perfect veganism epitomises the spirit of our times.

Perfect veganism’s demand for unswerving adherence to a belief system is fitting for an age in which the middle, in which the grey areas of doubt, ambiguity and non-committal reflection, are vanishing. Perfect veganism is perfect for an era of religious and political extremism, of polarised judgements, in which everyone is completely spot on or utterly wrong, everything terrible or brilliant. Perfect veganism is perfect for an age of competitive moralising, for people who deem themselves better than vegans, who themselves are better than vegetarians, who are in turn superior to us wishy-washy pescetarians. At the bottom sit omnivores. Scum. Sub-human scum.

Ours is a time of righteous intolerance and indignation, a mood that finds a natural home in perfect veganism, as the opening story about the butchers in Kent tells us. Those vegan ‘influencers’ who have dared to sit in the middle, to be liberal, to have the temerity to allow others to eat meat, have indeed been subject to online vitriol; online hatred will be deemed the defining phenomenon of the 2010s.

Online hatred reflects an age of envy and malice, in which people feel they can spew nastiness towards fellow humans just because they have right on their side. Or even worse: when they have right and compassion on their side. This is why those with the most ostentatiously caring politics are the most spiteful and rancorous when it comes to online discourse. This is how animal-rights campaigners and perfect vegans justify their intemperate behaviour: because they care more than you.

Veganism, perfect or not, epitomises the zeitgeist. It is an ideology based on the self – the self being a representative of a touchy, morally superior herd. Offend my beliefs and you offend me — so goes today’s thinking. You are what you eat, especially for fundamentalist vegans.

Veganism is befitting of an era of vanity and solipsism, of a time of intolerant, malicious, self-important, Not In My Name, #MeToo, 21st-century identity politics taken to the extreme. Because these days everything is taken to the extreme.

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WaPo Hates Strong Conservative Women Like Diane Black

The paper featured a mocking hit piece on Black's thoughts about the culture of violence

This week, the Post featured a mocking hit piece on Rep. Diane Black, a friend of The Patriot Post and leading Republican candidate for governor in our native Tennessee. Strong, intelligent conservative women are among WaPo’s favorite targets, and Diane is certainly at the top of that category. She chaired the House Budget Committee, where she led the charge to pass Donald Trump’s signature tax reform bill. That legislation has charged up the economic growth trend nationwide, as have many of Trump’s other achievements.

Speaking to a group of pastors about the “root causes” of violence in our culture, particularly among youth, Black proposed several issues that she believes are undermining social order. “Deterioration of the family” and violence in movies were two of her examples, both of which we’ve highlighted. But the Post targeted its scorn on her assertion that pornography is also to blame.

“Pornography [is] available on the shelf when you walk in the grocery store,” Black noted. And then there’s the Internet, available on ubiquitous handheld devices. She lamented, “All of this is available without parental guidance, and I think that is a big part of the root cause.”

Of course, the takeaway from her comments would be that pornography degrades human worth and value, which everyone in the room understood. It’s evident that such degradation is a plague on our society, and indeed, objectifying and devaluing life paves the way for sociopaths to murder others without remorse. Of course, the Post argues that “the science isn’t settled” on the impact of pornography — except among those with a shred of common sense.

According to WaPo, smart people know guns are the problem: “Studies analyzing mass shootings in the United States and contrasting this country with others demonstrate that the single most important variable is the high number of guns in the United States…” But as I have articulated, violence in America is a culture problem, not a “gun problem.” Clearly, that doesn’t fit with WaPo’s statist efforts to repeal the Second Amendment.

However, what’s really at the core of WaPo’s attack on Black? The future of the Democrat Party depends on its continued ability to dupe female voters, its most dependable constituency. Strong conservative women like Diane Black pose a serious threat to that Demo-dependency.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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