No thought-closet is complete without this year’s creative little insult – snark so trendy it deserves its own logo:
A linguistic toupée for the receding intellect! Use it today, and not even your friends will forget you’re stupid.
No thought-closet is complete without this year’s creative little insult – snark so trendy it deserves its own logo:
A linguistic toupée for the receding intellect! Use it today, and not even your friends will forget you’re stupid.
“Yes I made it up in a photoshop program for fun.”
Good stuff, John West.
Seriously thinking that this fella has some gender or mommy issues unresolved, amongst other things.
It would seem that most Canadians support some form of law against “hate speech” and crimes in general that are based on hate.
Most Canadians are wrong…well intentioned but still wrong. Any law that attempts to control thought or the expression of thought (no matter how reprehensible that thought might be) is masking a totalitarian agenda that must be resisted vigorously.
Imagine for a moment that some guy is standing on a street corner. He’s standing up on a soap-box and holding a megaphone. He’s talking about how he believes that pedophilia should be made legal.
What would you think? What do you think would happen to this guy? Well, first of all, it’s a no-brainer that people would indeed take notice of him…but probably not in the way he would want. In very short order, everyone would find out who he was (name, address, and known history). The guy would lose his job quickly and would have one helluva time finding a new one. No one would want anything to do with him. Heck, people wouldn’t even want to be seen sitting at the table next to him in a restaurant. In short, the guy would be labeled a freak and would be ostracized generally by society.
And all of that done without a single “pro-pedophilia speech law” on the books.
The point is: Just because there are moral norms that 99.9% of society can agree on, it doesn’t mean that we have to create laws to try and enforce those norms. The society takes care of it for us.
Similarly, if some freak is standing on a corner and spouting off about his hatred towards some group of people who belong to a particular race, religion, or creed, the society at large will see him for what he is and no one will want to associate with him.
And this is where the real rub comes in. Leftists don’t trust the general public to be able to shrug off the remarks of someone with a racially-based bug up his rectum. Why? I dunno. Maybe because the leftists themselves like to categorize people according to these superficial generalizations and they are just worried that others might not come up with the “correct” stereotypes.
And that is what all “hate” crimes are really about. It’s not that they want you to AVOID having any preconceptions based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. It’s that they want to make sure that you have the right preconceptions (the ones that they come up with).
bryceman: One minor flaw in your argument. You imply that our society has some eternal unchanging moral code. This is incorrect. Our society has purposely rejected such codes and as such the pedophile advocate may well be the “martyr to the cause” that tips public opinion in favour of the practice of pedophilia.
How long would it take before the pedophile then takes his case before a Human Rights Tribunal because his employer fired him or his landlord evicted him or the pastor from the church next door says that children should not be the victims of a sexual perversion that the adult will not control himself?
Then of course people who share WK’s view on state sanctioned speech will assail the pastor as being some kind of freespeecher.
Joe said:
You imply that our society has some eternal unchanging moral code.
Not true, Joe. I never said or implied anything about any moral codes being “eternal” or static. Moral norms are what they are at any given time. Thoughts and perceptions change over time and I recognize that.
What I am saying is that norms exist because of the way that a society is at any given point in time. Morality cannot be legislated and attempting to is foolhardy and can only lead to a totalitarian regime where acceptable thought is imposed – rather than being left to evolve in whatever manner it will. Moreover, it is pure vanity for activists or the state to even try to impose some sort of moral code.
Because, the question will always be, “Which dictator’s code do we follow today?”
Kevin Jaeger said… [ on Brock ]
Nice post, Mike, but you make the mistake of taking anything Warren says seriously or as if it were offered with intellectual honesty, consistency or good faith. None of those things apply to anything he writes.
When you have one of those annoying, yappy little mutts chewing on your shoelaces and humping your ankle you don’t try to reason with it. The only reasonable thing to do is to punt it off, hopefully into passing traffic.
9:07 PM
[ A masterpiece, Kevin ] = TG
What will happen if somebody attends a demonstration carrying a placard that says –
“BEHEAD ALL THOSE WHO WANT TO BEHEAD US”
Just asking.
“What will happen if somebody attends a demonstration carrying a placard that says –
“BEHEAD ALL THOSE WHO WANT TO BEHEAD US””
People would look on with a perplexed look, similar to the one I have now trying to understand whether you have a point. Then they would carry on with whatever they were doing before.
John West, too bad they wouldn’t use your ‘made up’ photo-shop creation, very appropriate. Might even be tempted to subscribe if they did. Won’t hold my breath mind you…
Great job though.
An interesting thought Bryceman:
“Because, the question will always be, “Which dictator’s code do we follow today?”
I refer you to the bureaucratic POS that is the Canadian Constitution, the first line:
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom guarantees the right and freedom set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law.
So yeah, we are pretty much at the mercy of the tyrant of the day. We have allowed morons like Kinsella to give us a constitution that isn’t worth the paper it is printed on and is hardly fit to wrap your chips in.
This is why the Yanks codified their morality in their constitution and are loathe to change it for the special interest groups of the day. We need to do the same. Spell out our rights and values specifically and commit them to law, and to hell with the radical moslems, the militant homosexuals and the looney fringe groups that might be offended. As it is, we have allowed guys like Kinsella to deprive us of our morals and ethics because they might offend somebody. People that are offended by our society and morals should not be living in this country.
Re: A linguistic toupée for the receding intellect!
LOL. Brilliant. Not sure why you do not have Warrens job at the NP Kate. Am guessing the pay might not be that great. Also SDA is way more fun.
Mike Brock said:
“I wasn’t advocating against civility. Nor was it my intention to imply that civility was a bad thing. I think my argument was a little more nuanced than that.”
>> Civility is the social nuance which refers to all the free choices we make outside the scope of criminal activity. Civility in any society should be a self policing thing you do of your free will following your moral compass, not under fear of force. Our self policing should be evolved enough to govern our speech so as it does not hurt guiltless civil people. However, when civil purity is lost in the acts and words of public figures…when their actions and intents are less than civil, reciprocal fair comment is also civil…such fair ciomment on compromised civility needn’t spare these people hurt feelings…all that really matters is telling the truth as you see it…it is infinately civil to “offend” someone who has iffended you with simple words (sticks and syones break bones words do not harm you)…in an uncivil society people who piss other people off are horse whipped or stoned by mobs…If you take the opetion it insult an insulter away with censorship, then there is only one option left to people you piss off…that is the sticks and stones option…remember that WK.
MB:
“To be “civil” in a society is to conform to the cultural and political norms of that society. In a liberal democracy, what is “civil” is a very broad definition.”
Well it is a tad more complicated than that Mike….suffice to say that “conventional social wisdom” echoes cultural norms…”political norms” are manufactured and injected into societies and cultures by posers…many of these injected political “norms” are socially and civilly disruptive and anathema to “conventional wisdom”…this is the realm of the social engineer shaping cultural norms…mainly through propaganda but there is an element of intimidation through the force of the state imposing criminal sanctions on non criminal personal choices…this form of social change is “uncivil” because society has not changed its conventional wisdom by rational self realized catharsis…it has been lied to and intimidated into compliance of having criminal law expanded to effect non criminal realms…like thought, expression and all victimless political crimes….this is the water the Kinsella-Warman junta tread…and anyone with the capacity for critical independent thought will see their anti-civil constitutional subversions for what they are…and have the right to say so….publicly …and in the most uncivil manner….regardless of who is offended.
I do, and I think it’s moot if they feel my free expression of what I believe to be fact is civil or not.
It’s up to messrs Warman and Kinsella to counter my arguments in the theater of public opinion….but obviously Warman is too frightened to go there (for obvious reasons) and Kinsella thinks public opinion is only there to spin.
Can someone read that and agree with it, and still think that we ought to have laws prohibiting gay marriage?
I agree with the “wornoutcantsellit” comment. Maybe it should be Wornout Kan’tsellit to maintain the correct initials. This guy is way past his best before date and reminds me of a Naval Signal sent to someone who screws up – “My only regret is that if we were at War, we would be on the same side.” I think many Liberals are thinking that about good old Wornout right now, and cringing. Of course I could be giving them more credit than they are due.