Laura Bush supports Jamie, Dan, Darwin, and Bettina’s position.

I would of paid good money to see this debate in which the statement ‘We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values’ was argued. While some readers on this blog find merely discussing this kind of thing distasteful its nice to know what there are some willing to have this kind of debate.

I thought this was an excellent counter argument:

‘Our superiority need not be asserted violently.’ He reiterated a point made by David Aaronovitch about the crisis of Abu Ghraib. Ultimately the discovery that America had committed torture reaffirmed liberal values. ‘Lynndie England was found guilty,’ Murray said, ‘in the West. By the West. For the West.’

I very sympathetic to this position:

The winning majority howled with pleasure when Ibn Warraq summed up the debate: ‘I don’t want to live in a society where I get stoned for committing adultery. I want to live in a society where I get stoned. And then commit adultery.’

At the end the audience gets to vote and Western Value came out on top. Apparently the debate audience is more classically liberal than the liberals that read my blog.

A children’s book that has been updated reflects the influence of liberal ideology on culture. This kind of thing is quite fascinating because its very well controlled for confounds. Its the same book just updated to reflect cultural change.

A post looks at California administrators defying the will of the people by still using race as a determinant for college admission.

The fact of the matter, however, is that while Harris’s life circumstances have been “difficult,” difficult circumstances are not confined to black students. There is absolutely nothing in the description about Harris that is uniquely an obstacle confronted by blacks. Whites have also been known to file for bankruptcy and to have parental inadequacies. Asian and white kids also attend unstable schools. Yet, because Harris is black, every disadvantage in her life is interpreted as a problem engendered because of her “race.” And, those who support race preferences want to use the tool of “affirmative action” to compensate for those supposed “effects of being black.” They want to do that which the United States Supreme Court forbids them from doing: “curing societal ills.” In the absence of Prop. 209, they could hide behind the fig leaf of “diversity,” but Prop. 209 removed their ability to do that in California.

This post is in response to comment left in the Good Sense to Judge post.

Tolerance

For the record, I was not talking about classically defined tolerance I was actually referring to a more recent variant that is heavily informed by relativism. This form of tolerance aims to eliminate judgment completely by using relativism’s argumentation that all truth is relative to the person. Since truth is confined within the individual, judgment beyond the person is not justifiable. One can never know another person and therefore one must always abstain from judging others.

You current definition of tolerance is mildly incoherent. It seems to be making the strong claim that people can judge all they like, but are restricted from taking action. In matters of judgment it’s unclear when one can and can not take action. The obvious example is the context of this discussion. Your definition of tolerance tells us nothing about how the university of Columbia should proceed.

Some judgments warrant action. One of the most common ways to avoid the required action is to ignore the judgment. The father of a murderer is less eager to call his child bad then the father of the one that was murdered. This is in large part because admitting the judgment justifies taking the action of having his son incarcerated or sentenced to death.

One gets the sense that Columbia university is refraining from judging President Ahmadinejad as a terrorist, oppressor, and killer or our soldiers merely so they can avoid the action of refusing to let him speak. How does one get around the problem of denying the obvious fact that President Ahmadinejad is an oppressor, terrorist, and killer? Using relativism one denies such judgments because one can’t know things from his perspective. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Lacking his perspective we can’t judge him bad, and therefore we can have him speak.

I should like to know does you definition of tolerance allow or prohibit President Ahmadinjad from speaking?

Generalize or Analyze?

You object to my characterizing the whole of one culture as being either good or bad. You desperately want to analyze further and talk about different components. Certainly one can analyze a culture into bits and often times one is wise to do so. However, one can be just as wise to make broad judgments provided they are willing to do the work of analysis when their broad judgment fail to be effective. In this regard I think its fair to say that on the whole, contemporary middle-east culture is bad.

To put the question to you: on the whole, would you say contemporary Middle-East culture is good or bad?

If you know anything of Middle-East culture you will have to resist the urge to respond with bad. You might take comfort, as my roommate did, by dismissing the question as being nonsensical. Nevertheless in your heart of hearts you know the answer. Certainly I can understand why people struggle with answering the question. The response makes them look ugly. Leaves them vulnerable to charges of; how did Jamie characterize me: “a biggot, an idiot, a racist and a simple-minded fool“. Quite a price to pay for uttering something that is so trivially true.

Analysis at such a broad level leads to the conclusion that Middle-East culture is bad. Sure we can analyze it in to different components and show that some parts are bad and others are not. But in the final analysis, when we aggregate everything together, when we give a cost benefit analysis of the culture in its entirety, we have to give it a thumbs down. The culture is just a little to intolerant (irony intended) of heterogeneity to be considered good.

Middle-East culture is not evil. Such terms are invariably used to censor valid counter arguments. Its much like using terms like ‘bigot’, ‘racist’, or ’simple minded fool’ to characterize a valid if not overly broad generalization about a culture. For the record i make no distinction between Christian or Muslim culture. Its not the Muslim faith that makes a culture bad. Cultures that are all about lethally enforcing homogeneity are bad whether they believe in Jesus Christ or Mohammad or they are still waiting on their prophet.

Demonstration of Lacking Good Sense

Your last paragraph captures perfectly what I’m trying to say. While President Ahmadinejad kills our soldiers and gives material support to terrorists we can’t judge why he does things until he we understand his perspective. Thus, it makes sense to refrain from judging him as bad and therefore not worthy of speaking until we can hear what he has to say. Oddly you freely admit what he says lack merit and yet you still want him to speak.

This is what is meant by lacking good sense. The virulent form of tolerance that restricts judging a demonstrably bad guy as bad all for the edification of a perspective you freely discredit. It just plain good sense to judge this guy bad and for that reason refuse to let him speak. Further analysis is just not needed.

Jamie responds to my post about Columbia university:

Yeah, I can see how threatening sanctions against an organization because you don’t like their speaker list is indeed libertarian. Where does it end?

Pulling funding does not explicitly prohibit Columbia from bringing in certain speakers. Some might argue that they want to pull funding because it puts Columbia in a financial situation that they must comply with an approved speaking list. I have no desire to pull funding for this purpose.

It makes no sense for the state to fund institutes that happily give legitimacy to it’s enemies. The state should not be allowed to prohibit institutes from selecting certain speakers, but it makes no sense that the state must fund those institutes. It’s unclear how this is an anti-libertarian position. If anything the mere reduction in funding regardless of reason is very libertarian.

But now lets turn it on you. How do you justify giving legitimacy to the head of state that’s actively killing our soldiers? If the response is that he can’t possibly gain legitimacy than the next question becomes why have him speak? If everyone knows he is crack pot and has nothing of value to say then what’s the point of him speaking?

Would you support a university that brings Osama Bin Laden to speak? It’s hard to see how you would discriminate between a head of state who’s policy have lead to citizen death and a head of an organization whose policy have lead to citizen death. If you support a university’s right to let Ahmadinejad speak then you should also let Osama speak.

Along the same lines you should also support that University’s decision to allow Timothy McVeigh or Jeffrey Dahmer to speak? How about the shooters from the Columbine killings? Would you support the University’s right to bring the murderer of your wife and kids to speak on the proper ways of raping a child? If you were contributor would you continue funding the university?

Concepts informed by relativism like tolerance and multiculturalism mutate into a childish world view that leads to poor judgment. Some people are monsters and they are not to be tolerated, but put down. No amount of ‘understanding’ is going to civilize them. Some cultures are superior to other cultures. No amount of ‘understanding’ is going to stop the stoning of homosexual in middle-eastern cultures. Some people are simply bad and some cultures are simply bad.

One must have the good sense to discern between good and bad. Western culture is good while middle-east culture bad. Capitalism is good while Communism is bad. Soldiers sacrificing themselves to protect civilians are good while terrorists intentionally blowing themselves up to kill civilians are bad. Relativism robs the person of this good sense of discriminating between good and bad. It denies simple judgments even when those judgments are warranted. (The opposite, which is endemic to conservatives, is hyper-judgment which leads to missing essential nuance for proper judgment.)

Relativism corrupted the good sense of the administrators of Columbia to judge Ahmadinejad as bad, and as such, someone not suitable for inclusion in serious discussion.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad country of Iran has been accused of sneaking weaponry into Iraq to kill US soldiers.

Other advanced Iranian weaponry found in Iraq includes the RPG-29 rocket-propelled grenade, 240 mm rockets and armor-piercing roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, Fox said.

Iran has denied U.S. allegations that it is smuggling weapons to Shiite militias in Iraq, a denial that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterated in an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired Sunday.

“We don’t need to do that. We are very much opposed to war and insecurity,” said Ahmadinejad, who arrived in New York Sunday to attend the U.N. General Assembly. “The insecurity in Iraq is detrimental to our interests.”

As I’m sure most of you are aware, the University of Columbia has given the okay for Ahmadinejad to give talk on campus. The ideology that leads to this outcome is rooted in tolerance and multiculturalism. The ideology that informs both of these concepts is the notion that all people are basically the same and that if we just understand their perspective we can gain insight that might lead to resolution. Such childish thinking leads to asinine outcomes like giving legitimacy to a holocaust denier thats administration is actively giving support to the killing of our troops.

While the child administrators at Columbia are progressive enough to invite the Iranian president they are not tolerate enough to entertain advocates of strong border control.

The Iranian president was to address students and faculty at a forum only days after Columbia retracted a speaking invitation to the president of the Minuteman Project, a controversial citizens’ group that seeks to secure America’s borders from illegal immigrants, even going so far as to try building a fence along the border with Mexico.

Minuteman founder and president Jim Gilchrist said he feels “sweet and sour” toward Columbia after an invitation to participate in an Oct. 4 talk was taken away last week. Gilchrist appeared at Columbia last year, but his speech was thwarted when students and other opponents stormed the stage as he took the podium.

I would fully support congressional legislation pulling all federal funding out of that university and if I lived in the state I would support state legislators pulling their funding as well.

Nietzsche would mock and deride democracies. For the most part i think he was wrong but on one dimension he would argue that democracy weakens the state is by giving voice to the weak. Its hard not to see a democracy as weak when it’s powerless to stop a childish ideology from bringing an enemy to our shores for the purpose of understanding and tolerance.

A cartoonist in Sweden is stepping up to Al Qaeda.

I have not been following the latest controversy closely but Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks pissed off al-Qaeda by drawing Mohammed as a dog. Hey, change it to a cross, put it in a urinal and you can get a grant from the U.S. government.

This week’s No. 1 in al-Qaeda in Iraq placed a £50,000 bounty on his head. The offer is £75,000 if his throat is cut. Vilks told the Times of London: “I suppose that this makes my art project a bit more serious. It is also good to know how much one is worth.”

Diatribe sends me a link to a opinion piece looking at racial discrimination in undergraduate college admissions. He outlines a very strong and convincing argument. Readers who have advocated for using the government to force companies to provide more information about their product should happily support the arguments put forth in this piece.

I fully agree with Colorado school officials.

“It causes a lot of conflict on the playground,” said Cindy Fesgen, assistant principal of the Discovery Canyon Campus school.

Tag should not be allowed at school because it might cause psychological harm for children. This is a departure from my previous position, but Darwin and the 9th circuit of appeals convinced me that the constitution grants every single person a right to never feel bad about anything ever.

In the spirit of preventing psychological harm, I just want to fully apologize for posting this after Diatribe already did. Diatribe you are still a unique and special little snowflake. Even if you are a wanker.