Terrorists and hate speech at the Daily Caller

Over at the Daily Caller I got a piece published about the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. Take a look:

This use of violence to silence “offensive” speech is structurally identical to hate speech laws, the only difference is that it was vigilantes that executed “justice” this time. I’m not calling supporters of hate speech laws insensitive and I’m not saying that they support terrorism. I am saying that their goals are identical to those of the men in who committed this atrocity. Those goals are to suppress “offensive” or “harmful” or “hateful” speech through coercion and government action is inherently coercive. Progressives seem to only want to make this violent suppression more systematic through the use of the legal system.

Thanks a lot to the wise and handsome opinion editor over there.

1832722002_4e5c5ce01f_o

An open letter to a budding terrorist

Dear Budding Terrorist,

Greetings. You don’t know me, although perhaps you might be inclined to think that you do, but I thought that I might do something different and break the ice. I understand how unsettling it is for an infidel or mindless sheep or collateral damage or whatever to make the first move, but relationships in violence don’t seem any more or less complicated than relationships in love. And seeing as how we’re basically going to be getting off on the wrong foot no matter how we carry ourselves, I hope you will permit my indulgence.

First I want to offer my most heartfelt congratulations. I mean that sincerely. You’ve found something to believe in; you’ve found something far larger than yourself, and to which you have submitted your whole being in order to be defined by it so totally that it almost obliterates everything you were up until that point. That is not an easy thing to do, I imagine; to wholly dedicate yourself to this or that creed, however abstract on its face, however diluted or manipulated by cleverer but still lesser minds. This is more than I can say for most people I know and love, and I am very close to respecting you far more than I do them. Speaking for myself, living in a fog of unbelief has proven satisfactory and securing in only the most superficial sense, like going into a vast wilderness with nothing but a sharpened tree branch.

That you found something, a proverbial light penetrating an otherwise total darkness, in other words, is great. I am happy for you. You want something better than what you have, and moreover you want it spread as far and wide as possible so that, I presume, it gives others the feeling that it gave you. It’s on this point that I’d like to offer some advice.

In setting about with persuading people of the superiority of your beliefs, it helps to have a sense of proportionality when doing so. I know that this seems rich coming from a citizen of the United States, a country that never knew a disproportion it didn’t like, but be assured that I speak to you as someone thoroughly fatigued by any and all disproportion, not only those inflicted against my fellow countrymen but those inflicted in our names against others wholly undeserving. To put it bluntly, I speak as someone who is tired of seeing people get killed. I’ve not seen very many compared to others, I admit, but I’ve seen enough at a reasonable enough distance to know that whatever good anyone thinks will come out of it just won’t.

Perhaps you’d think it out of line of me to presume that you’d kill anybody. Perhaps you’re convinced that people you seek to persuade will very clearly see the very same light you saw and fall in line with no bloodshed or other force necessary. I think you and I both know that that is the highest order of bullshit. Whatever the content of your belief, your fervor will be stoked so early and often that it may well eclipse the former. It will very likely be stoked by people who casually disregard your worldview. It will certainly be stoked by people who willfully disregard it, indeed, who disregard it with vulgarity and vehemence, with insensitivity and antipathy. Perhaps they do not seek to harm you personally, but you may feel wounded all the same. How dare they persist in flouting The Truth? How dare they belittle and ridicule that to which you’ve so dedicated your time and energy? These people are beyond persuasion, you’ll conclude, they are beyond redemption, and so making an example of them will surely make more sense to you. Against vile words and images you’ll take action and your point will be made.

Even if you haven’t made up your mind on that point, I offer only this suggestion: don’t. Don’t make an example out of anyone for expressing this or that crude criticism. Don’t threaten and don’t kill, if not for the sake of your victims then at least for the sake of yourself and whose name under which you do it. It will not only fail, it will elicit negative results. Your cause, for one, will be regarded outwardly as unjust, even malignant if it isn’t already, but more crucially your actions will be responded to, and likely overtaken, by the very sentiment you hoped to stifle. Your vulgar, locally renowned target will go national, even international; its subversive infamy will be imbued with an almost knightly heroism. Innumerable people of all stripes, of all backgrounds and views, will go out, into the cold if necessary, to express solidarity with it and defend its right to be as vile as it wishes.

It’s perverse, really, that it would take you killing someone to remind everyone else of freedom’s presence. Freedom, don’t get me wrong, is every bit as abstract as the ideas to which you’ve clung, hell it might even be more so, yet therein lies its power. You come to us with a mind to impose rigidity and obedience, perhaps more than was intended at that, or worse if we refuse; freedom imposes generosity and presupposes at least some dignity in pretty much everybody. To some it is granted far more easily than others; it was to me and I’d hazard a guess that it was almost equally as much to you. I feel sorry for people who don’t quite grasp that feeling, but in the end there’s only so much time to give to people like you and me when there are others under more trying circumstances and with some responsibility for them attached to us.

You and I are not really all that impressive, valuable or memorable in the grand scheme of things. Maybe we should just be friends.

Sincerely,

Chris

(Image source)

tweet_outrage

How sad it must be to be angry all the time

Well I didn’t call it.

The perpetually indignated lefties at Slate have declared 2014 “The Year of Outrage.” They aren’t wrong; and it’s more than a bit ironic the writers making the claim are also responsible for the madness that now defines the internet news cycle. A handful of the site’s reporters weighed in on the outrage phenomenon, some admirably taking responsibility for it. Jordan Weissmann, to his credit, lamented the “impulse to jump on the outrage cycle” and drive traffic to small pieces of life’s innumerable injustices. He defends the practice however, saying “viral hits help finance other less outraged, more important journalism.” Yes and drug-dealing can also be used to fund soup kitchen operations. The latter doesn’t make the former any less immoral.

Betsy Woodruff does a decent job highlighting the more embarrassing attempts to use outrage machinations by conservatives. But even while well-meaning voices on the right are apt to use harsh-worded demonization, the kind of determined vitriol progressives embrace is another matter altogether. For the left, outrage is a lifestyle instead of a seldom-felt emotion.

(more…)

albanroe

Thanks, and Happy New Year

A new year is cause for thanksgiving and rededication, so here’s a dog’s breakfast of housekeeping and personal things. The blog is now a little over eight months old, and has grown from just myself to the 19 bylines we’ve had since then. So first of all, my thanks go out to everyone who’s contributed a piece this past year. This blog would not be what it is without you. I learn a lot from all of you, and I value your ideas. In case you were wondering, the undisputed traffic king around these parts is Rob, especially for his posts on Gamergate. Here’s to more in 2015, and those reading this who have not published here but might be interested in doing so, please contact me.

Secondly, thanks to all our readers and those who have linked or blogroll’d us. To name some of them roughly in order of the traffic they’ve sent us: Marginal Revolution, Nick Land, Free Northerner, Scott Alexander, Ace of Spades, Social Matter, Nick Steves, Robert Stacey McCain, Real Clear Policy, and Ed Sebesta, bullier of churches, who despite putting up two posts about me sent us a grand total of 39 visitors. Sorry nobody reads you Ed!

We’re averaging over a thousand pageviews a day now, which is awesome.

*****

On a personal note, yesterday I was received into the Catholic Church at St. Luke’s at Immaculate Conception, an Ordinariate parish in Shaw, not far from where I live. I went into some of the reasons why I became a lapsed Anglican in this post, largely out of suspicion of the neoconservative sympathies of many leaders of the Anglican realignment in the DC area. I still think they were and are right to flee the Episcopal Church and its tyrannical leadership. Episcopalianism is historically a religion of American elites, and as the elite consensus has shifted further to the left, it faced a choice between Christian orthodoxy and its historic class affinities. The Episcopal Church made the wrong one. TEC is resolutely pro-abortion and its health ministry is helping to implement Obamacare; Gene Robinson and the NEHM’s director are fellows at the Center for American Progress.

However, it is not at all clear to me that people like Fred Barnes, Michael Gerson, Howard Ahmanson Jr., and other politically connected movers in the Anglican realignment have any particular concern for what we in the Ordinariate call “Anglican patrimony.” In fact, they seem to see the matter as just another front in the culture wars. Those first two, among others, were chief propagandists for the disastrous second Iraq invasion, which has reduced the Christian population of Iraq by around a million. Most disturbingly, there is evidence that Barnes, Ken Starr, Mort Kondracke, and the rector of my family’s parish put themselves under the instruction of Jerry Leachman, who is, to put it mildly, certainly not an Anglican. It seemed to me that leaving the Democratic Party at prayer, only to become the Republican Party at prayer, was not going very far at all. I had always been against abortion and preemptive war, for the same reason.

Hindsight is 20/20 and all, and many have admitted after the fact that the Iraq invasion was a catastrophe. But if this doesn’t speak to a crisis of authority, I’m not sure what would. When reporting the above for a piece I ended up withdrawing for personal reasons, I couldn’t help but compare Rev. Yates’ response to me on the Iraq war — that it had gone badly, but that weighing in on matters political was unwise in such an influential congregation — to Michael Novak’s fruitless petition to the Vatican in 2003. The Holy Father, at least, was able to speak the truth about injustice without worrying about offending powerful congregants in the media or civil service.

Not long after I put up that post, news broke that there will probably never be another Lambeth Conference, due mostly to TEC’s desire to hew more closely to the Democratic Party than the rest of the Anglican Communion. Around the same time a friend informed me that St. Luke’s, once an Episcopalian congregation that converted, was moving from Bladensburg to downtown, on my way to work. Given the above, I took this to mean that the Catholic Church wasn’t going to leave me behind, and knew it would be wrong not to honor that. At that point it was a matter of putting my money where my mouth was.

I received the Eucharist for the first time yesterday, and to put all this behind me is truly a gift from God. I encourage anyone else who’s been disturbed by any of the above to do the same. There is peace and security in the Universal Church.

The picture above is of St. Alban Roe, whose name I took during confirmation, a martyr of the English counter-reformation, hung at Tyburn during the Long Parliament for the crime of being a priest. A convert himself, he is described by the main sources as being “remarkably chearful and facetious even in the midst of his sufferings.” Here’s the exchange he had on the gallows, from Bishop Richard Challoner’s account:

“Pray sir,” said Mr. Roe, “if I will conform to your religion, and go to church, will you secure me my life?”

“That I will,” said the sheriff, “upon my word my life for yours if you will but do that.”

“See then,” said Mr. Roe, turning to the people, “what the crime is for which I am to die, and whether my religion be not my only treason.”

Bp. Challoner’s says his speech from the gallows was taken to parliament and stored there, but it hasn’t been found. He is occasionally pictured with a playing card, in reference to him gambling while in prison, betting small prayers instead of money.

*****
To get back to business (blogness), I’d like to hear from you, reader. If there are changes you’d like to see, topics you’d like to see covered, writers we should get, or have any other kind of comment or criticism, please sound off in the comments.

Sacred Harp 401: ‘Cuba’

Go, preachers, and tell it to the world,
Poor mourners found a home at last.

Through free grace and a dying Lamb,
Poor mourners found a home at last.

Go, fathers, and tell it to the world,
Poor mourners found a home at last.

Go, mothers, and tell it to the world,
Poor mourners found a home at last.

The lady and I went to the FSGW’s New Year’s Day sing in Alexandria this week, which was small but lots of fun.

Argument vs Club

Sorry to hear that, but let’s remember that I’m the real victim here

Words are useful insofar as they have publicly agreed upon definitions. From definitions, we can have discourse that leads to some sort of useful truth. But what happens when the meat and potatoes of a discourse is made up of terms that have a powerful connotation, but no precise definition? You get people talking past each other in a fog of emotion and cognitive bias.

Slate Star Codex started the new year with a very long but very important post on the a specific expression of feminism’s contempt for nerdy men. It concerns an MIT professor, Scott Aaronson, opening up about being tormented throughout his adolescence by crippling self-hatred issues.

(sigh) Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.

My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did. Anything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.

Of course, I was smart enough to realize that maybe this was silly, maybe I was overanalyzing things. So I scoured the feminist literature for any statement to the effect that my fears were as silly as I hoped they were. But I didn’t find any. On the contrary: I found reams of text about how even the most ordinary male/female interactions are filled with “microaggressions,” and how even the most “enlightened” males—especially the most “enlightened” males, in fact—are filled with hidden entitlement and privilege and a propensity to sexual violence that could burst forth at any moment.

Aaronson goes on to explain that he was so tormented that he’s tried to castrate and kill himself. So what useful truth to feminists have for him? It’s made clear that he needs to recognize that his misery is necessarily of a lower grade than what women feel. Women are oppressed and men are not, so no matter how bad he feels, it’s never oppression-grade bad, whatever that means. Secondly, we are to believe that his own assessment that feminism made him feel the way he did is wrong, and that It’s actually the patriarchy. For whatever reason, whenever gender is part of the story, the focus has to be on women.

The best example of this is an article posted on the New Statesman. Laurie Penny wrote an article explaining Aaronson’s folly for him, titled “On Nerd Entitlement.” Jesus Christ, we’re off to a bad start. I am going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that the tears shed for him were not of the Crocodile variety, but they sort of look that way. She is, intentionally or not, using one man’s heartfelt expression of suffering to make it about her. His painful collision with the diktats of a powerful cultural force was made into a passion play about about how that very same cultural force is the medicine that he needs to learn to learn to like. The problem I have with this way of approaching the issue isn’t that it’s mean, it’s that it presumes that all of society has taken certain vague concepts as gospel.

By using the loaded terms “patriarchy” and “oppression,” feminists are begging the question that these things actually exist in line with their definition. The fact is that those are both controversial and non-falsifiable concepts. There’s a few things that, if they are actually interested in a discourse, feminists need to establish.

(more…)