Right to Bear Arms and Secular State

Europeans don't generally understand that many things that Americans do have the purpose of protecting the individual from the state, whereas the inhabitants of the Old Continent think that they are done for different reasons.

Two of the most illustrative and important cases of this misunderstanding are the right to bear arms and the secular state.

Europeans usually think that the US Constitution's right to bear arms has to do with individual protection from criminality and violence from other individuals. In reality, its main goal is to protect the citizen from the power of the state.

Without this constitutionally-enshrined right only the state, through the armed forces and the police, would be be authorized to have the use of arms, and this is a huge source of power and control.

It's reminiscent of the origin of the expression 'crossing the Rubicon'. The Rubicon is a river in Northern Italy which is sufficiently distant from Rome to have been elected by the ancient Roman Republic as the safe boundary, the defining line which nobody could cross with an army. The Romans knew only too well that weapons are a great source of power.

You must have an enormous trust in a government to allow it to be the only entity to be permitted to carry arms.

In my second example, Europeans in their majority believe that the secular state serves the purpose to protect the state from the power of the Church, whereas the opposite is true: the separation between Church and state has the role of protecting the Church from the power of the state.

Christian Values Erosion Opens the Way to Muslim Polygamy

A typical example of how the erosion of our Christian values has left us without defence against the encroachment of Islam is that of polygamy.

Multiple divorces and remarriages in the West have created a situation which is similar to polygamy with a man or a woman having more than one family. The only difference with Muslim polygamy is that men and women in the Western variant of polygamy are on an equal footing or rather, if there is a discrimination, it is against men.

In these circumstances, Muslim polygamy has been a much more easily accepted practice, with authorities and police in Western countries turning a blind eye to it, than it would have been the case in the past, when people knew what the word 'family' meant, before the time of constant redefinitions of the term to include homosexuals, threesomes, incestuous couples and all the ever-expanding circle of relationships that the concepts of marriage and family must now apply to.

As it is, it's not clear what the ethical basis for the rejection of Muslim polygamy should be, since we have allowed things that have similar consequences for the children, for instance, left in many cases without a clear father figure or even without a father at all, as in the case of single-mother 'families'.

In many ways, there are a lot of similarities between Muhammed and Henry VIII: they both formed religious principles around their physical needs and personal desires.

What's Wrong with Tattoos

It's interesting how there are things that we know instinctively and we think that they are just a gut feeling without much empirical evidence to support it, whereas in fact we know these things unconsciously, we know them without knowing why.

I have always found tattoos repugnant but I didn't attach importance to this feeling, one way or the other.

I then read several years ago Theodore Dalrymple's great book Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , which I recommend, where he recounts and describes his experiences as a prison doctor, among other things. In it he says that a disproportionate number of prison inmates have tattoos.

So there was something after all in my dislike for these mixtures between body graffiti and self-harm.

In all the intervening years since my reading that the fashion of tattoos has spread a lot, especially among the young.

And now I have just read that the practice of tattoos is associated with many unhealthy and antisocial behaviours, including suicide, aggressive and/or delinquent behaviour, can be psychologically addictive and can lead to infections, according to scientific studies. Research on adolescents has shown a correlation between tattooing and living in a single-parent household, lower socio-economic status, high risk behaviours, substance abuse, violence, sexual behaviour, school problems, eating disorders.

The fact that tattoos have become increasingly fashionable  is part of the "dumbing down" trend especially in teenagers and young adults, the tendency to do one's worst instead of one's best, to try to emulate the lower or even criminal classes, in language, music (or rather cacophony), intellectual pursuits or lack thereof, street fashion, and the like.

This also shows that our gut instincts, although they should not be blindly followed, should at least not be discarded without some thought because there is an adaptive value in them, as psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer explains in Reckoning With Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

Source

The British and Political Correctness

I remember that, when I first came to live in London from Italy in 1984, before political correctness had begun in earnest, I read in books and magazines and heard on the TV many jokes about, say, the French or the Germans which, if they had been about blacks or Muslims, might have started a riot in the ethnic communities areas.

I've never, throughout all the decades I've been living here, seen any sign of discrimination, not even the slightest, tiniest and most insignificant, against Africans, West Indians and Asians, but Europeans were fair game.

Being Italian, it also happened to me sometime to hear jokes or other stereotypes about Italians.

The British then seemed to suffer from a superiority complex and to believe that no one in the world could be as good as they were.

A certain degree of political correctness existed already but, as I said, it was exclusively for the benefit of non-Westerners and anyway not yet as ferocious and draconian as was to become later.

Eventually that political correctness seems to have affected, as if by contagion, unintentionally, Europeans too.

I didn't think that I would ever say this but I would rather change the present time for the days when, yes, the English were a bit insufferable at times with their self-importance, but at least people were freer to speak and they didn't have to censor every word for fear of the thought police as they are now.

US Democrats Exposed in Favour of Banning Corporate Profits

Watch this video because it's worth it. It shows how communist at heart (and a bit naive to say the least) US Democrats are, in common with their leftist brothers all over the world.

Europe's Muslim Population Tripled

A Pakistani paper announced that the Muslim population in Europe has tripled in the last 30 years.

According to the Pew Research Centre, there were over 44 million Muslims in Europe in 2010 and over 58 million are projected to live in our continent in 2030.

Wikipedia Unreliable, CNN Says

Just a confirmation of what we already noticed.

This article on CNN on Wikipedia's unreliability refers to Wikipedia business and celebrity pages, but the easiness with which inaccuracies and misleading statements can spread on that online 'encyclopaedia' is true for all of it, especially if they are politically correct and pro-Islam.

Just look at the Wikipedia entry for Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the Islamic and Arabic chief centre of learning in the world. At Al-Azhar subjects that we would not normally associate with a prestigious university are taught as part of the curriculum, such as "The Treachery of the Jews" and "Islamic Jihad and Its Various Forms", as illustrated in the above video of a programme shown on the Egyptian Al-Rahma TV. The video is entitled Egyptian Cleric Miqdam Al-Khadhari on the Benefits of Al-Azhar Curricula: The Only Textbooks to Militarize the Students and Teach Jihad and Hatred of Jews Extensively.

According to Faith Freedom, Al-Azhar University curricula encourages extremism and terrorism.

And even the ultra PC New York Times reported this, happened in 2009:

Inside Al Azhar Mosque, a 1,000-year-old center of religious learning, the preacher was railing on Friday against Jews. Outside were rows of riot police officers backed by water cannons and dozens of plainclothes officers, there to prevent worshipers from charging into the street to protest against the war in Gaza.

“Muslim brothers,” said the government-appointed preacher, Sheik Eid Abdel Hamid Youssef, “God has inflicted the Muslim nation with a people whom God has become angry at and whom he cursed so he made monkeys and pigs out of them. They killed prophets and messengers and sowed corruption on Earth. They are the most evil on Earth.” [Emphasis added]

On top of everything else, this continuous reference to animal epithets is speciesist, as well as anti-Semitic.

And now, just a few days ago, we have this (from Breitbart):

Al-Azhar Grand Sheikh Dr.Ahmed El-Tayyeb has called for enacting an international law that bans the denigration and desecration of Islam and its sanctities, which he said, have been violated by some "fools" who do not know the value of social peace between peoples, and do not mind fueling discord.

Dr.El-Tayyeb also demanded the punishment of those who committed such a "heinous and shameful '' act against Islam's Prophet Mohammad, peace and blessing be upon him (PBUH), calling meantime on the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to work for issuing such a law that would criminalize the insulting of Islamic sanctities and those of all universal religions, which, he added, would cause the disturbance of world peace and threaten international security, both are responsibilities of the UN and its Secretary General.

Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar , the oldest religious university worldwide, likened what happened against Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) to claims of insulting Semitism that has resulted in verdicts against several people all over the world, including thinkers and scientists.

El-Tayyeb added in his statement that silence does not befit officials at this dangerous and critical situation, stressing that such a "foolishness" should not go unpunished.

Interestingly enough, another Wikipedia entry, on Islam and Antisemitism, says:

Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque and Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar University, and "perhaps the foremost Sunni Arab authority", has been criticized for remarks made in April 2002, described Jews in his weekly sermon as "the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs." [Emphasis added]

Despite all this, the Wikipedia page on Al-Azhar University does not make any mention of anti-Semitism or jihad, and the only reference to freedom of speech is to say that Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy in October 2007 "drew allegations of stifling freedom of speech when he asked the Egyptian government to toughen its rules and punishments against journalists". But the naughty Tantawy was "a supporter of then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak", so it doesn't count.

Overall, someone who didn't know anything about Al-Azhar University, reading Wikipedia would get the impression that it's an erudite, nice place where everything is hunky-dory as befits a religion of peace.