Clash of civilizations?

Q: So, we are now facing "the clash of civilizations": the West and Islam, two civilizations which are equally great.
A: Yes.
Q: On one side, we have the civilization that gave the world democracy, the concept of rights, Roman law, Greek tragedy, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, Darwin, modern science, technology, Michaelangelo, Caravaggio, Raphael, Giotto, Brunelleschi, perspective in art, Picasso, Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, Verdi, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Euclid, Saint Peter's Basilica, the Empire State Building, Kant, Voltaire, ...
A: OK, let me stop you. We've got an idea.
Q: On the other side, we have the civilization that gave the world the Koran, a few pretty mosques, the numbers notations we use...
A: No, actually the numbers we use were invented in India. We call them Arabic only because they reached us through Arabic translations of the original Sanskrit texts.
Q: Even the zero?
A: Yes, the zero as well is an Indian invention.
Q: OK, so on the other side, we have the civilization that gave the world the Koran, a few pretty mosques, and er... a few pretty mosques.

With Gays and Blacks, We Have Gone to the Opposite Extreme

The problem is that people don’t seem to be able to find the right middle.

There was a time when homosexuals were wrongly persecuted, when they couldn't even be open about their homosexuality, and that certainly was a bad state of affairs. Luckily we have gone past it and that’s fine.

But people are so afraid that we could go back to that time that any criticism of homosexuality is taken as a sign of "anti-gay" discrimination: this is the opposite extreme, in which the persecution and discrimination are actually at the expense of those who disagree with the orthodox, dominant ideology that homosexuality must be perfectly OK from all viewpoints, medical, psychological and ethical, which is not necessarily the case.

The wide acceptance of the idea that homosexuals should be free to declare their homosexuality, that others should not look at them as they did in the past, that they should be treated like everybody else, is positive, it's an improvement.

This does not necessarily mean that homosexuality is a good thing for those involved as well as for society at large.

That’s where we should try to find the right middle. We should be able to - we should feel mature enough as a society to - recognise that having an accepting attitude towards homosexuals does not imply thinking that homosexuality is just another sexual orientation, like heterosexuality, or lifestyle, and that there's no problem associated with it. These are two different things.

A similar mistake has been made with blacks, Jews, and in relation to all those bigoted and discriminatory positions of the past, which have now been transformed into the opposite extreme, as if to guard ourselves against the possibility of relapsing into those bigoted ideas. That is not the right approach, going from one wrong extreme to the other wrong extreme is not the way to prevent the first wrong extreme. It’s actually the opposite.

That's what happens in the sphere of immigration and racism.

There is now a severe repression of ideas in people, who can’t say anything negative about blacks or Muslims, or - although not half as much as a few years ago - express negative positions about immigration, without risking accusations of racism. Even disagreeing with Obama - who is probably the worst president of the US so it’s easy to disagree with his policies - is enough for being called a racist. Criticising Israel, although people who do are usually wrong, attracts labels of anti-Semitism which are not necessarily correct, and so on.

So there is a situation in which you go from one extreme to the other for fear of relapsing into the first extreme, whereas in fact it’s much more likely that you’ll relapse into it if you got it wrong the second time round again. For instance, the current ferocious repression of anything that may be even remotely construed as racist or anti-Semitic or Islamophobic or homophobic may produce a climate to which people in the end will rebel, and in such a rebellion against the thought police system they will risk reverting to the original wrong ways again.

1968 Greens, Reds, Pinks and the Normalisation of Paedophilia

The Left, red or green (it's usually both), tends to have no moral objection to the normalisation of paedophilia, the next step after the normalisation of homosexuality.

People on the Left, which includes "gay" activists, have in recent years kept this issue quiet without wishing to disclose their real intentions to the public to avoid the probable risk of jeopardizing their goal of normalising homosexuality, but, now that they have won that battle after achieving homomarriage, that acceptance of paedophilia is part of their agenda will become increasingly explicit.

I want to clarify that I am totally for protecting the environment, but not environmentalism, an offshoot of socio-communism that has hijacked the conservation cause for the Left.

Just before the German elections, a Pedophilia Scandal: Old Document Haunts Green Party Candidate:

Leading Green Party candidate Jürgen Trittin is under heavy scrutiny this week after researchers found his name on a decades-old paper supporting pedophiles.

With the general election only days away, the Green Party's top candidate Jürgen Trittin is under fire over a document more than 30 years old. The party manifesto, which he approved, advocated legalizing sex with minors.

The latest politician to be dragged into the Green Party's pedophilia scandal is Jürgen Trittin, the party's top candidate in the upcoming federal election. He was responsible for a 1981 election platform that included a call for the decriminalization of sex between children and adults.

The platform belonged to the Göttingen branch of the Alternative Green Initiative List (AGIL), a forerunner of the current Green Party, and was uncovered by political scientists Franz Walter and Stephan Klecha of the Göttingen Institute for the Study of Democracy. The organization was hired by the Green Party in May to investigate the party's affiliations with pedophile activists in the 1980s.

In an essay for the left-leaning Die Tageszeitung newspaper on Monday, Walter wrote that Trittin, at the time a student who was running for city council, was one of five members of an editorial board that signed off on the election manifesto. The document called for sex between children and adults to be made exempt from punishment, so long as it involved neither violence nor the threat of violence.

As Walter explains, it was not uncommon for the AGIL to take over the platforms of minority interest groups [like homosexuals and paedophiles].

Jürgen Trittin told Die Tageszeitung that the researchers' findings were correct. "It was simply taken for granted that we adopted one-to-one the demands of various fringe initiatives, such as those of the 'Homosexual Action Göttingen,'" Trittin said. "The responsibility was mine and it's a mistake I regret."...

The Green Party is spending more than €200,000 ($267,000) on the study to investigate its past history of support for pedophiles. The price tag is a handsome sum, considering the party's annual budget of €5 million, and suggests the party is eager to clarify and resolve the murky chapter in its history.

That history caught up with the party earlier this year, when comments on children's sexuality in the 1975 autobiography of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Green Party representative in the European Parliament, resurfaced in the media.

The most recent revelation comes at an unfortunate time for the Green Party. With less than a week to go before Germany's general election, Trittin's political opponents have already begun to exploit the issue to discredit his campaign.

"Trittin needs to consider whether he really is the right man to be fronting the Greens," said Philipp Missfelder of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Alexander Dobrindt, general secretary of the conservative Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), told the website of the magazine Focus that Trittin should withdraw from his position as the Green Party's leading candidate in the election.

Regarding 1968 revolts' hero, revolutionary and anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Wikipedia writes:

In 1978 an edition of Pflasterstrand, an alternative magazine Cohn-Bendit edited, described being seduced by a 6-year old girl as one of the most beautiful experiences the author had ever had...

Cohn-Bendit published a number of provocative statements regarding "sex with children" in the 1970s and early 1980s, notably in his 1975 book "The Great Bazaar" where he describes erotic encounters with five-year-olds in his time as a teacher in an anti-authoritarian kindergarten. He has been accused as advocating pedophilia since at least 2001. This controversy re-erupted in 2013; as Cohn-Bendit received the Theodor Heuss Prize, there was a rally by anti-pedophilia activists. The affair triggered wider research into the pro-pedophilia activism which prevailed in the German Green Party (without direct involvement on the part of Cohn-Bendit) well into the 1980s. An article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung uncovered numerous "repulsive" passages (abstoßende Texte) in Pflasterstrand, a leftist magazine which appeared under the editorship of Cohn-Bendit, and cited a 1978 defense of Cohn-Bedit's of this editorial practice, as well as an appearance of Cohn-Bendit in a French television talkshow in 1982 where he described being erotically undressed by a five-year-old. Cohn-Bendit reacted to these allegations by claiming that his descriptions of erotic encounters with pre-pubescent girls were not based on true events but were merely intended as what he today calls "obnoxious provocation" aimed at questioning sexual morals at the time that "shouldn't have been written that way."

Cohn-Bendit is accused of endorsing sex with children and may even have practiced it.

In his 1975 book "The Great Bazaar" he wrote: "It happened several times, that a few children would open the fly of my pants and begin to stroke me. That represented a problem."

These leading figures are only a side of the problem. When the German Green Party was founded in 1980, paedophiles were part of it. Some documents show that the influence of paedophiles on the party was much stronger than previously thought.

At the first party convention the platform was shared by "Urban Indians," who wanted the "legalization of all affectionate sexual relations between adults and children." In the early years there were in the German Green Party groups which advocated the liberalisation and decriminalisation of sex with children, among which was the "Working Group on Gays and Pederasts."

From Spiegel:

He is a boy, roughly 10 years old, with a pretty face, full lips, a straight nose and shoulder-length hair. The wings of an angel protrude from his narrow back, and a penis is drawn with thin lines on the front of his body.

The 1986 image was printed in the newsletter of the Green Party's national working group on "Gays, Pederasts and Transsexuals," abbreviated as "BAG SchwuP." It wasn't just sent to a few scattered party members, but was addressed to Green Party members of the German parliament, as well as the party's headquarters in Bonn...

No political group in Germany promoted the interests of men with pedophile tendencies as staunchly as the environmental party. For a period of time in the mid-1980s, it practically served as the parliamentary arm of the pedophile movement.

A look at its archives reveals numerous traces of the pedophiles' flirtation with the Green Party. They appear in motions, party resolutions, memos and even reports by the party treasurer. That is because at times the party not only supported its now forgotten fellow campaigners politically, but also more tangibly, in the form of financial support...

[P]edophiles, noisy and wearing colorful body paint, were often a visible part of Green Party gatherings.

Left and Right: Do These Words Mean Anything?

Is Ron Paul a left or right winger?

He is a Republican, so on the face of it you would say he's on the right.

But his foreign policies, particularly his pacifist stance and opposition to American military interventions, place him on the left.

Not only that. He, like other Republicans and conservatives, is a libertarian.

Let me start with a little historical digression.

The first time I came across the word "libertarian" it was in conjunction with "communist". Communist libertarians is another name for anarchists: that's how many anarchists in the 19th century were called, to distinguish them from individualist libertarians like the French Proudhon, the man who wrote "Property is theft".

This association between libertarianism and anarchism should not be surprising, since anarchy, as its Greek origin indicates (privative alpha + arkhe, power), is the absence of a state, and libertarianism is the drive towards decreasing the size and reach of the state. So anarchism is, in some way, just the extreme form of libertarianism.

And here we have a clear paradox of the left-right divide in politics: anarchism is a classical leftist movement. At the time of the First International, Karl Marx and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin famous disagreements did not focus on the goal: they both wanted the same thing, the abolition of the state. Their disagreement only concerned the means to reach that goal: Bakunin advocated the establishment of anarchism immediately after the proletarian revolution, whereas for Marx after the revolution there was to be a transitory phase, the dictatorship of the proletariat, which he (obviously wrongly) thought would eventually dissolve itself to give way to anarchism.

So, we have a political position typically associated with the right, libertarianism, which is just on the same spectrum of opinions of Marxist and anarchist aspirations.

What is ironical, of course, is also to think of classical communists wanting to abolish the state, albeit only after establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, when today leftists the world over are trying to increase the size of governments beyond any autocrat's wildest dreams.

The problem is also to do with the meaning of the terms "freedom" or "liberty" which, like "justice", can have diametrically opposed interpretations.

In the case of justice, some people believe that what is just is that everybody, irrespective of what good or bad, much or little they have done, should get identical outcomes and have as much as possible the same: they see justice as a leveller.

Others think that justice means rewarding people for what they have done good, punishing them for what they have done bad, and doing neither if people omitted to do good or bad: they see justice as a life guidance, something that guides you to make the right choices.

The latter definition, in my view, is the one that is likely to produce better results in helping people to express the best of themselves and achieve their potential, whereas applying the former interpretation of justice almost inevitably leads to complacency and even downright abuse.

As for liberty, Marx stretched its meaning beyond recognition, in a way reminiscent of the Orwellian 1984's "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is knowledge". He thought that liberty meant giving people everything they needed, he was thinking of freedom from need rather than freedom from the controlling power of others, be they the government or other citizens.

The latter is clearly the historical liberal interpretation and the most commonsensical use of the word.

It is no coincidence that the communist and even socialist distortion of the meaning of freedom has led to some of the most oppressive, repressive and liberty denying regimes the world has ever seen.

Since "libertarian" derives from "liberty", again it is no coincidence that the conflict of opinion surrounding the latter is transferred into the controversy around the former.

In conclusion, my answer to the question that forms the headline of this article is that the words "left" and "right" in politics still have a meaning, in the sense that they represent real differences in world views about humanity, society and government, albeit not as clear cut and defined as some would have it.

I don't expect to treat this issue exhaustively in an article, but it's fair to say that the demarcation lines are much more blurred than is usually thought.

In particular, what I find objectionable is some behaviour, much more often seen in people on the left, of referring to the opposite end of the spectrum, in this case "right wing" or "fascist", as an epithet to shut down debate in the absence of valid arguments.

The fact that there is a certain overlapping, historical and ideological, between right and left makes this behaviour even more irrational.

I started with Ron Paul as an example of a difficult definition, now I'll give the example of myself: on most things I would be classified as being on the right, but I am a supporter of animal rights. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.


Photo by George Kelly

Global Warming or Global Control?

Well done to Australia's new Prime-Minister-Elect, the conservative Tony Abbott.

He pledged, as his two top priorities, to stop the tide of asylum seekers to the country and to scrap the highly unpopular tax on carbon emissions. Both very admirable intentions.

Cutting CO2 does nothing for the environment but a lot for the economy: it destroys it.

The environmentalist movement is fundamentally socio-communist. It has proclaimed itself the only saviour of the earth, but the reality is that one does not need to agree with its pseudo-scientific, highly ideological theories or belong to it to care about the environment.

Being Leftist, environmentalists want to see the role of the government expand and its control over individuals and businesses snowball.

Communism is internationalist in nature - "Workers of the world unite!", Karl Marx said. The first socialist upheaval, the Russian Revolution, was supposed to spread to other countries and only reluctantly, when that became impossible, the idea of "socialism in one country" was accepted.

An old dream of communists is that of a world government. This internationalism (and transnationalism) is another of the many aspects in which Muslims and Leftists are similar - along with promising paradise on earth, being utopian and therefore authoritarian and dictatorial - , and which make them such ideal allies.

"Global warming" is the perfect pretext for global governance and control. Not coincidentally Canadian communist Maurice Strong, a great believer in world government, was behind the project of establishing the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The world government - "global problems require global solutions" - that environmentalists and people like Strong have in mind is such that in comparison the European Union pales into insignificance.

The most absurd aspect of any kind of policy designed to tackle climate change is that, even if the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory were true, which is highly doubtful, there is very little we could do to stop this alleged Armageddon.

One thing on which even the warmists agree is that anything we could do - even if we completely stopped carbon emissions, shut down our economies and returned to a primitive society - would, at most, delay the catastrophe by a few years.

In addition, since the Kyoto Protocol is not binding for countries like China and India, by far the most populous, carbon-emitting nations in the world, even that small delay would not be achieved.

That in itself is enough to show that saving the planet is not the reason and the purpose for all this gigantic tumult and scare. Frightening people is a very good way to control them, and whoever controls the energy production and consumption - by dictating what individuals and companies can and most importantly cannot do - controls the economy and therefore the world.

Obama's Top Aide: No Concrete Evidence of Assad's Responsibility for Gas Attack

A survey by The Associated Press of members of the US House of Representatives shows that, of all those declaring a position, 6 times more respondents were or were leaning towards opposing military intervention in Syria than supporting it.

This anti-war skepticism corresponds to that manifested in recent polls by the American public, even among those who believe that Assad is responsible for the chemical attack.

This allegation is far from established beyond a reasonable doubt, as has been admitted even by Obama's Chief of Staff.

The number of people killed by the sarin attack on August 21 in Syria is disputed. The US cites intelligence reports saying that over 1,400 people died, and the Anti-Assad Syrian Coalition, in Washington to lobby members of Congress to vote in favour of an American intervention in the war, claims the number is even higher.

But in fact only 502 have been confirmed dead.


http://www.chron.com/news/politics/article/US-Common-sense-test-holds-Assad-responsible-4796462.php

Going to War to Help Jihadists? Here's an Idea!

It makes me furious when I hear US Secretary of State John Kerry or other people like him say that we must not remain idle but respond to the atrocity committed by Assad in using chemical weapons against Syrians.

For many years now hundreds of thousands of Christians have been persecuted, massacred and ethnically cleansed predominantly by Muslims the world over. Every five minutes, it has been calculated, a Christian is killed just because of his faith and nothing else. This is in addition to all the other causes for which Christians as well as non-Christians are killed, like wars, civil wars and so on.

Does this not constitute an atrocity, in Kerry's, Cameron's, Obama's, Hague's, Hollande's estimeed opinion?

Judging from their actions it doesn't: they have hardly uttered a word about this crime of the greatest magnitude, let alone expressed the intention to go to war because of it.

If your predisposition to moral outrage is so selective as to become criminally discriminatory, if the expression "double standard" is as weak to describe your behaviour as that of a man jumping into a pond to help person A keep her hair dry while letting person B drown, you have lost any credibility in claiming ethics as the reason for your actions.

What, if not morality then, could be the motive of Kerry, Obama and their gang of interventionists?

You'll forgive me if I cannot find any without the consultation of a standard psychiatry text, which I don't have handy at the moment on my holiday in St Ives, Cornwall.

Unless the decisive reason against going to war on the side of Assad's opponents, the "Syrian" (20 percent, though: 80 percent are foreign jihadists going wherever non-Muslim infildels can be killed and Sharia states imposed) rebels dominated by Al-Qaeda and other terrorist elements, gives us some clue to at least Obama's desires.

The rebels have made clear their intentions of moving their jihad warfare to Europe and America when they're done with Syria. Once Syrian Christians will be dead, or have fled the country, or converted to Islam, or accepted subjugation to their Islamic masters and paid the special jizya tax imposed on non-Muslims, once all the other niceties of sharia law will be forced on Syria, the jihadists' task there will be accomplished, finished, and they'll have to find somewhere else to do their good work.

Since, thanks to our wonderful, progressive program of encouraging invasion from the Third World, celebrating diversity and welcoming Islam, many of these jihadists are European, nothing will be easier for them than coming back home and putting to use the various techniques and skills they've acquired in the Syrian war: there is nothing like hand-on experience for mastering a job to perfection.

America will be next too.

Given that Barack Hussein Obama was born and raised a Muslim and has never failed to show the strength of his ties with and admiration for his old religion, the only reason, unlikely as it might be, for the senseless act of helping Muslim terrorists in their program of Islamisation of all countries, including ours, can only be that this does not appear senseless to someone who shares the same Islamic ideals.

I'm sincerely hard-pressed to find other motivations that don't involve a study of the level and pathology of the mental faculties of the war hawks (with apologies to these magnificent birds of prey for the unflattering comparison).