Monthly Archives: July 2009

Why Do Americans Think We Have a “Right” Not to be Judged?

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I subscribe to the Leah Remini blog, a fact that I expect most people to judge me for rather harshly. Deservedly so, because frankly I have no real interest in Remini (although I do think she was the high point of King of Queens) aside from the idle curiosity of how famous and semi-famous people run their blogs. For the most part Remini’s blog posts are a series of one line responses to emails from fans which are surprisingly fascinating to read. Or maybe you should be surprised by how fascinating I find the Zen like monotony of blog posts that look like this:

Carrie ~ I am not doing a movie, but good luck on yours!

Jen ~ Thanks hon

Rochelle ~ The diet is called Dr. Cohen’s 1st personal diet. It is in the weight loss story on my Blog

Glenn ~ Thank you so much and I love the idea of Rico having his own show… very good idea

David ~ Thank you so much for the book and yes, I did get the book and I so appreciate it. Thank you.

Michelle ~ I do not know honey about the clothes I wore. As for your other question, when we film in bowling alleys and stuff, most of the time, it is just a fake set on the sound stage, but sometimes it will actually be at a local bowling alley. As far as paint and all that, it is just a mixture usually of water, food coloring etc. It is not actually paint.

Why can I waste a good half an hour reading that? You be the judge.

And I mean that literally.

Feel free to psychoanalyze me from your Internet armchair. Maybe it’s because most of my emails are hate filled invective bordering on death threats so I’m envious of Remini’s dry and mild interactions with her fans. Maybe I’m waiting to see how long it is before she says something rude, sub-consciously expecting her to be similar to the character she played so well. Or maybe I’m just a procrastinator.

But whatever theory you come up with concerning my embarrassing taste in web fare I can assure you of two things. First, while I may disagree and argue with you about it I’ll never put forward the idea that you have no right to make judgments about me based on information or actions I make public. The second is I won’t really care unless you actually libel me (Michael James Gregg I’m looking at you) so while I enjoy both robust debate with thoughtful commenters and making trolls cry with some keen insight into their “lives” the fact is if it weren’t for the WordPress dashboard indicating when new comments come in I’d forget all about “controversial” stands I’ve taken like the fact I won’t be mourning Michael Jackson or that calling women whores is wrong. In both those posts I argued extensively in the comments with various people, and in both cases really could not have cared less what those people thought of me personally.

I am, perhaps, in the minority. In the Michael Jackson piece I referenced above one of the main criticisms of my position was that I had no “right” to judge Jackson based on his behavior. On the web you run into this sort of specious and ham handed nonsense in a variety of guises, from the families of criminals who tell you that since you “weren’t there” you shouldn’t judge their son/boyfriend/distant cousin/favorite serial killer to the sanctimonious newly pious who tell you that “only God” can judge a person. By these standards we would be unable to comment on Ted Bundy unless we were there when he murdered women, and we would have to empty the prisons unless someone can find a way to prove God thought a person was guilty.

Perhaps trial by fire? Or dunking?

It’s a modern conceit, this desire to not be judged, and one which has stealthily crept into the modern mind until it is just accepted by many that you have no right to make judgments about them based on their public actions or statements. I contend that this is an underlying cause in many societal ills, from crime to drug abuse. This idea that you should be well thought of no matter what you do, that you are above criticism, is a dangerous devolution from adulthood into perpetual adolescence.

Which brings me in a round about way to my guilty pleasure, Leah Remini’s blog. A few days she wrote a piece entitled The Rachel Ray Piece/ Please Shut Up Already About It. She includes a smiley face emoticon to lessen the punch. As far as I can tell it was in response to an old controversy (from the Summer of ’08) in which Remini and family were mulling over doing a reality show, tested the waters with a Rachael Ray appearance and were promptly called bad parents because their child was having a rough time getting off the bottle.

“Aha!” I said while sipping my coffee. “Another example of the Internet chateratti overstepping their bounds and delving into near misogyny!” I could already see the long tirade I’d write in defense of this poor mother in my head, when I came across a few factoids that were going around. Long story short, what people were reacting to was the fact Remini’s child was four years old and still on the bottle (which is bad for the child’s teeth, but actually not so rare) and may have still been in diapers.

Having worked with kids and even with toddlers in Head Start programs I’ve actually seen similar situations. Since I didn’t see the show I’ll reserve final judgment, but frankly when children are four and still in diapers it’s usually because the parents are finding it easier to deal with that than go through the pain of potty training. It is similar with bottle feeding.

Unfortunately it limits the child if not taken care of. A Head Start I worked at had a 5-year-old who was still in diapers who was not allowed to start school because of it. It’ll surprise no one who worked in Head Starts that the mother was less than motivated.

Wind out of my sails I moved on, but was struck by how Remini ended her blog post, with that familiar sentiment:

I hope that some of you count your blessings and maybe return to the decent people I know you can be. Maybe spend less time judging people and more time on being compassionate about other peoples “shortcomings”.

Just because we can say anything about anyone on the internet doesn’t mean we should.

Which on the surface I would agree with but Leah Remini is the person who invited discussion and criticism of her parenting in the first place. I frankly feel, after cursory reading of the whole kerfuffle, that Remini and her husband are probably decent enough parents who, like many post-modern couples, have no idea how to instill the discipline needed to easily wean their child. They have weaned her, and I’m personally not invested in caring how long it takes to wean children as long as the parents don’t stick diapered 5-year-olds in a program I’m working, but why are we expected to not judge people who are in the public eye?

There was very little anger from Remini when the positive judgments we make about her are to her benefit. When we say she’s an attractive woman there’s no blog post shot off to demand we look beyond her physical assets. And please don’t misunderstand my point to mean that she should either simply accept criticism graciously (she shouldn’t) or that the way people did criticize her on the gossip blogs was acceptable. She has every right to be part of the debate she herself initiated, and should stand up for herself especially when it comes to the Internet gossip sites who insult rather than criticize. Remini also has a right to expect, and demand, that criticism of her not be vulgar, demeaning or false although she technically only has the legal right to the last. But she’d be right to take the overblown hyperbole (She’s not a fit mother!!!) to task.

But if she’s asking people to simply leave their judgment at the door when seeing her, then she is infantilizing herself as well as her child.

For some reason, perhaps the “self-esteem” movement that started when I was young, Americans feel that their personal behavior is beyond reproach. I have seen it argued many times that there is a literal right to not being criticized, that people should never be made to defend themselves or their actions. In this route lies madness. People are not made of glass, though we have created generation upon generation of people with egos so fragile that you’d think the merest whiff of disapproval shatters their psyches irreparably and leaves us with a skinny-jean wearing vegetable forever muttering “Don’t judge me!” while being fed soup by a nurse with a Doctorate in Emotional Socio-cognitive Therapy she got from The University of Phoenix.

Why are we so delicate? Since when have we lost our ability to meet the challenge of criticism head on? More and more I have found that someone will leave a comment here calling me some horrible name or insinuating something unseemly and when I respond in kind (though admittedly not kindly) I then usually get some response that boils down to the same person asking why I’m being mean to them. We have reached a level in society where even trolls who leave racist/sexist/vulgar comments on blogs feel that they are being slighted when someone turns the tables on them and makes them feel bad. See the comments in this post for an example of what I mean.

Making judgments is the most basic responsibility to ourselves and our society that we have. It’s time we start teaching people that simple lesson again.

The Allen Carlos Case: How Liberal Government and Unchecked Bureaucracy Destroyed a Law Abiding Canadian

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The case is a terrible abuse of power by Canadian officials who used the government in their private vendetta against a man they didn’t like. Shades of Sarah Palin? You decide. Katey of Katey Firearms Facts fame does a great job breaking down this case, and if you want more details a book was written about the case which is available online.

Think this can’t happen here with the Democrats in power? Don’t kid yourself:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjzAtQFg4OI[/youtube]

Religion of Peace Teaches Children to Harass Gays – in Minnesota

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While police officers and other Americans do nothing to stop it. It is a shocking and outrageous video that should make people realize that not promoting Muslim assimilation of our basic core values, like minding your business and not threatening strangers, has potentially deadly consequences. Via Jihad Watch:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfW9inRkTpU[/youtube]

Even more shocking is that the victim seems totally unaware of how much danger he was in, perhaps a sign of how truly coddled we are as a society. Not shocking at all: some feminist, oops I mean Womanist,  has found a way to blame the Minnesota Somali Muslim populations intolerance of homosexuality on … European Colonialism. Now do you see why I won’t use my Master’s to adjunct?

The Advocate has more.

England is the Most Violent Country in Europe

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And it surpasses the United States, long harangued for how violent and barbaric we are by the toothless finger waggers of Britain, in cases of assaults, rapes and muggings. Of course the Brits are trying to explain away the Clockwork Orange like spike in violence caused by a combination of civilian disarmament, hug -a-thug policing and the soul rotting moral decay of any massive welfare state but those explanations don’t pay the hospital bills:

Britain’s violent crime record is worse than any other country in the European union, it has been revealed.

Official crime figures show the UK also has a worse rate for all types of violence than the U.S. and even South Africa – widely considered one of the world’s most dangerous countries.

The figures comes on the day new Home Secretary Alan Johnson makes his first major speech on crime, promising to be tough on loutish behaviour.

The Tories said Labour had presided over a decade of spiralling violence.

In the decade following the party’s election in 1997, the number of recorded violent attacks soared by 77 per cent to 1.158million – or more than two every minute.

The figures, compiled from reports released by the European Commission and United Nations, also show:

* The UK has the second highest overall crime rate in the EU.
* It has a higher homicide rate than most of our western European neighbours, including  France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
* The UK has the fifth highest robbery rate in the EU.
* It has the fourth highest burglary rate and the highest absolute number of burglaries in the EU, with double the number of          offences than recorded in Germany and France.

But it is the naming of Britain as the most violent country in the EU that is most shocking. The analysis is based on the number of crimes per 100,000 residents.

In the UK, there are 2,034 offences per 100,000 people, way ahead of second-placed Austria with a rate of 1,677.

America has a violent crime rate of around 466 per 100,000. Canada is around 935 shockingly enough. Both numbers are dwarfed by jolly old England’s jaw dropping 2,034 violent crimes per 100,000 citizens. Worse is that because England is significantly smaller than the United States what this stat really means is that more people in England are touched by violence than here in America even as they claim we’re so much more dangerous.

Like I said there are a lot of factors at play here, but if I were to nutshell it I’d just say that criminals in England know they can do what they want without serious consequences. Here in my new home state of South Carolina if someone tried to hit my house with a home invasion they’d get shot, and I’d be well within my rights. Thus, here in SC there are less home invasions than in blue states where they take a more English view of self-defense, because the would -be home invader never knows what’s waiting for them behind the target’s door. In England even defending yourself from a violent attack is forbidden, but the attackers can also be assured of light sentences and perhaps no jail time at all if police do in fact even catch them.

Any rapist/mugger with a brain will be heading to England right now, where they basically allow you to break their laws and provide you with a populace of sheep unable to defend themselves. And any English person with half a brain would run to the nearest U.S. Embassy and apply for asylum.

Death Knell of the Republic

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There is an assumption on the right that though our opponents on the opposite side of the aisle may believe in Marxist principles or adopt revolutionary leftist tactics and ideas that at the end of the day they are Americans first, as proud and patriotic as the rest of us. We call their support for socialist programs misguided; we call their obsession with disarming us fearful childlike naivety. We go through life assuming that the left/right divide in this country could be bridged through discussion and debate, that we can woo hardened revolutionaries to the cause of freedom, liberty and prosperity no matter how pointless and hopeless it seems. Thus for too long the future of our country, our families and our American republic has been jeopardized by the invisible hand of a visible enemy as we ignore, again and again, the words and deeds of the radical left, the so called progressives, who have openly told us for generations that their goal is the destruction of western civilization, and the implementation of an academist utopia wherein the new elite, composed of the unproductive and nihilistic post-modernists that parasitically live in the bowels of our higher education system will become an ever present oligarchy in total control of our lives.

It is time to wake up. It is a dangerous fantasy to write off the revolutionary fervor of the activist left as puerile grandstanding that will end when those people are faced with the responsibilities and realities of adulthood. The Baby Boomer generation has proven that what we think of as teen rebellion can last a lifetime and have devastating consequences for our nation, yet we still cling to the belief that leftists are good natured friends and neighbors who are simply wrong about some policy or another. For more than 30 years leftists have bombed, rioted, murdered, raped and killed hundreds of their fellow Americans and we reward them by making their leaders college professors, by giving their ideological brethren our children to educate, by allowing them to bankrupt our country using their union and community organization front groups. We allowed them to continue to fester and drive America, and the Republican ideal, to the brink where we now teeter precariously as we enter financial ruin.

And in our darkest hour, with Wahhabism and Salafism ascendant in the Muslim world, Europe collapsing into chaos and a Soviet style bloc forming on our southern border America is being led by the very epitome of the academic leftist, whose foreign and domestic policies could just as easily have been hatched in an undergraduate sociology classroom as in a Washington think tank, and is just as radical and anti-Republic as any policy supported by Stalin or Mao. Americans have stood by dumbfounded as President Obama and the Stalinist kleptocracy he heads have nationalized banks then bullied those institutions into supporting policies designed to destroy our wealth. We’ve watched in horror as car companies were taken over and small businesses without the right connections were penalized, while Democratic donors have been enriched. We stand by as thugs from A.C.O.R.N. are being used to collect census data, Obama builds a civilian paramilitary and the Democrats lie, cheat and steal their way into a permanent majority, and all the while our leaders on the right tell us it’s still possible live as one People, one Nation, one Republic.

But what good is a Republic where rule of law is replaced by the tyranny of the masses? What kind of nation are we being told to be part of if we have an unelected elite dictating policy to our officials? I ask you, are these your people? Are you willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with people who seek to strip you of your rights, your dignity and your humanity? The only way to peacefully coexist with the rising tide of progressivism is to become slaves to a state run by people who believe that you and your desire to live free are not just threats to world peace, but fundamentally evil.

Right now the republic of Honduras has exerted the primacy of rule of law and refused to allow a communist lackey of Hugo Chavez to orchestrate a bloodless coup by holding an illegal election which would have violated the Constitution of that great country. In response Chavez has threatened invasion of the sovereign country, the European Union has cut diplomatic ties and the American news media is literally shilling for the return of the leftist dictator who is a criminal in his country. In a move that should have shocked no one, Obama publicly cut military ties with Honduras in an act that was little more than implicit permission for Chavez to invade our ally.

Predictably many on the right treated this betrayal of Republican ideals as if Obama simply didn’t understand the import of what he did. People compared his tepid reactions to the brutal and thuggish crackdown by the Iranian theocracy on protesters to his anger at Honduran enforcement of the laws of their land and came away with the laughable conclusion that Obama simply doesn’t know what he’s doing. But this caricature of President Obama as a bumbling buffoon, a 21st Century Jimmy Carter, is a gross underestimation of a pernicious and resolute enemy that has installed a like-minded radical in our highest office and buffered him with a stolen majority in our legislative bodies. Most of all, it minimizes the danger America, and indeed liberty itself faces today.

In a few days a book called The Coming Insurrection, written by apocalyptic anarchists in the wake of the horrible riots that engulfed France in 2005, will be available in America and already the same leftist groups whose ideology President Obama and the progressives represent are preparing to use the book’s call to violence against people like you and me to cause the sort of civil unrest that the authoritarians need to consolidate even more power. All the while the authorities will no doubt allow the targets of the political violence, Republicans, Conservatives, Libertarians, Capitalists and small business owners, to be swept away in the tide of persecution and bloodshed driven by the current of class warfare, class envy and minority grievance mongering that the academic left replaced education with in our school system. We stand on the precipice today and it is now our decision whether we step off into oblivion or stand up against the totalitarian horde and defend our liberty as savagely as they try to take it.

The storm that was once on the horizon is now here; it carries tyranny in its wind and it will drown those who do nothing in a torrent of oppression. If we do nothing, if we continue to reach out to the enemy within our country while they continue reach out to the enemies without we will find ourselves holding only our own destruction. We have never been so close to war in this country in my lifetime and the forces of liberty seem intent on taking the Chamberlain-like road we so often accuse our ideological opponents of being on. But make no mistake, our so-called friends on the left are not pacifists looking to avoid confrontation, but statists looking to stifle dissent and enforce ideological purity on America and the world. They hold no illusions as to the viability of continued coexistence with proponents of individual freedom, free markets and a rule of law that protects the hated minority with the “enlightened” elites who teach that pogroms and intimidation are acceptable political tools. They are not looking for middle ground on which to meet, but soft ground in which to bury us. They aren’t worried about building bridges, but burning houses and desecrating graves. The new left in this country will not settle for some imagined indefinite detente for America, but are actively working to destroy anything and everything that challenges their revolutionary worldview.

The tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots, but how much blood do patriots in America still have? What is the line you won’t let America cross? What is your final straw? The second holocaust Obama seems intent on seeing happen on his watch? Our allies in Latin America invaded and destroyed by Communist regimes that will consolidate into a Soviet style federation just a missile away from our border states? Gun confiscation? Election fraud? Or will it be when Obama and the Democrats hold their own referendum to make him dictator for life? Where is our line in the sand?

I am not calling for civil war. I am not asking for people to fight. What I’m calling for is for you to stand up before the only option left is war. I’m asking for you to be as radical, passionate and dedicated to freedom and liberty as the left has been. We must win this ideological battle and take back this country before there is no choice but to win a physical battle to keep small sections of it. We must organize, we must rally and we must prepare for what is the greatest threat to America we have ever seen and barely notice.