Obama Vs Roark: You Didn't Build That!

Left: Howard Roark's Speech in The Fountainhead (vid)
Right: Barack Obama: "You didn't build that"

In Egalitarianism, equality is the fundamental moral value: the standard of good and evil. Equality rejects equality at birth. Equality before the law isn't good enough. Equality of opportunity is insufficient. The value of equality transcends Christian and Marxist ethics; Egalitarianism wants much more: equality of outcome - HERE and NOW!

But here's the catch. Men are not equally deserving for what they are, but because they are essentially nothing. Obama's now infamous quote "You didn't build that!" perfectly sketches this implied tenet of Egalitarianism.

If you have a brain, a will, some skills, knowledge, character, desires, money, power, any ability or attribute, you were lucky, that's all. The actual producer is the state in the name of the collective.

And since the bottom is by definition made up of losers, equality can only be reached by cutting down the top. Egalitarians hold that for everone to end up with a fair share of zero, those leading the race should have their legs broken: "We must cut down the high flyers," animal rights wingnut, Peter Singer has stated.

Egalitarianism is sheer evil: strip man of all the attributes that make him an individual and the achievements that distinguish him from any other, and all men become equal. But what is left is an empty shell, in essence a zombie: the ghost of a human being.

The root of the ideology is Kantian Nihilism. The elevation of nothing to something. The zombie demands the sacrifice of the living man. The walking dead as moral man is the philosophy that rules the pOmo world!

Since there is so much unfairness, egalitarians dispense with a rational system and priorities. They compensate with swiftness and affirmative action wherever a case of perceived inequality presents itself. They are proud of their achievements, but in fact it is racist and evil.

Since egalitarians are ardent collectivists the first duty of government is overall redistribution and compensation. The moral standard is not man's life, happiness or the pursuit of it, but fairness, the elimination of nature's random inequalities.

The vehicle for compensation and redistribution is identity politics. Women seek to address sexism, the elderly ageism, the handicapped ableism, the ugly looksism, multicults imperialism, animal rights lunies speciesism. Competition is evil. There are no winners, no losers: everyone gets a prize, whether deserving or not. All demands are meritous, regardless of merit.

Egalitarianism is so detached from reality (perception as well as conception), most adherents do not even bother validating it. Equality is simply a moral axiom, an end in itself, a floating abstraction. This load of crap is ruling our world; it is the mental suicide of civilization.

The evil of Egalitarianism has come home in Environmentalism. For some reason no one has been able to explain inanimate nature has the same status as man. Therefore it has equal rights and we must stop defining better as richer, bigger, faster, more.

Watermelons (reds in a green jacket) is a charming idea, but it's inaccurate. The flag of environmentalism is not red or green, but the black of death.

Evil consequences are irrelevant to this ideology: intent is everything, so the ethics are infallible, regardless of the outcome.

While Marxism still had a vision of a better world, Egalitarianism is a postmodern construct to rescue the Socialist notion of equality (see flow chart Evolution of Socialist Strategies To Rescue Socialism From Failure); but it does so by a strategy of scorched earth: in death all men are equal. Man is a moral monster that deserves no better.

This all puts abortion and 'the right to die' in a somewhat less humanitarian light.

Related:

- Leonard Peikoff's "The DIM Hypothesis"
- Peikoff on the Election of Barack Obama

- John Rawls On Justice
- Margaret Thatcher on redistribution (vid)

- Think about this: is democracy Egalitarianism applied to government?

Global Warming = Earth Lib

"The battle for the world is not a battle between two political ideals. It is a battle between two views of the nature of thought."
-- Leonard Peikoff
_______________________________________________________________

Psychology deals with mental processes and behavior. Philosophy explains man's understanding of reality in terms of broad abstracts, based on three axioms: existence, consciousness and identity.

Axioms are self-evidences rooted in the perceptual awareness of the world around us. They have a built-in protection against attacks by reality dodgers who disagree: being the basis of all human knowledge, to disagree means relying on the very same axioms.

A child realizes that objects exist and learns to integrate sensations into percepts. This leads to the axiom of identity, which is necessary for human cognition. Entity and identity - differentiating one object from another - leads to the next discovery: the Law of Causality. In time a child absorbs and integrates all axioms.

Entities perform actions; it is what entities do. Walking is not possible apart from an entity with legs. An entity has certain attributes, while lacking others. A child shakes its rattle and hears a sound, whereas a pillow is mute. Every entity has a nature: specific, non-contradictory and limited. An entity must act in accordance with its nature.

On the basis of two points the adult validation of Causality consists in stating the relationship explicitly: the Law of Identity, and that action is an action of an entity: A = A. The alternative would be that an entity acts apart from its nature, or against it. Both are impossible: existence is identity. Apart from its nature a thing is nothing: a ball is not a ball if its nature is not that it is round.

Causality is a corollary of identity. A corollary is a self-evident implication of already established knowledge. The Law of Causality is the Law of Identity applied to action.

Vast numbers of men never get beyond axioms. A primitive tribesman - often even lacking an integrated consciousness - does not have the benefit of Aristotelian principles; he has no way of adhering to axiomatic consistencies. He ends up contradicting the self-evident, as is also the case in various mystical world views.

Of an entirely different order are men who have the benefits of advanced education, yet consciously reject axioms on political grounds, as is the case with Postmodernists - Leftist as well as Rightist subjectivists. A declared war on reality - deliberate and systematic self-contradiction - is the essence of their 'narrative.'

The philosophers of the past two centuries known as the anti-modernists, the Counter-Enlightenment movement or present Postmodernists reject the very idea of the self-evident as the base of knowledge and repudiate all three axioms, attacking them as 'arbitrary postulates,' 'linguistic conventions' or 'Western prejudice or (meta)narrative' (e.g. science).

Is it any wonder that the sequence of events get confused? The military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq are placed prior to the tragic events on 9/11 is but one example of time-line problems with cause and effect, the Law of Causality?

A CNSNews article has identified other difficulties related to direct causes: "A top Democrat told high school students gathered at the U.S. Capitol Thursday that climate change caused Hurricane Katrina and the conflict in Darfur, which led to the “black hawk down” battle between U.S. troops and Somali rebels."

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House (Select) Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee, betrayed his credentials by using another popular rhetorical trick from the Postmodernist cupboard, the false equation: (he) "equated the drive for global warming legislation with the drive for women’s suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries."

Either that, or a dialectical process from the Rousseau school of thought is taking place in the mind of the Representative, the liberation of planet Earth from the oppressions of the perceived 'white, male power structure' (another term for rational civilization).

More such stories have been compiled by M. Barbay in "Global Warming' Caused Regional Problem? (Since 1975)."

Here we see how a seemingly minute, deliberate, philosophical manipulation of the speculative, ideological variety - which separates the world of ideas (subjectivism) from the world of reality (objectivism) - can lead to major problems. But then, it was invented two centuries ago for that self-same purpose: the peddling of literally, 'non-sense.' The cause of crime is the law ... thought creates reality.

Another interpretation would be the manipulation of facts, or the 'Orwellian' rhetorical trick of changing definitions into their opposites resulting in oxymorons, for instance Hegel's "true freedom through the state."

Who remembers that modernity - the Enlightenment and its political offshoot liberalism, once stood for what is presently its opposite? Individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and rationality became collectivism, statism, socialism and anti-reason, the latter presently morphing into the ultimate expression and most frightening form of subjectivism: anti-humanism.

- Filed on Articles in "The Dystopia of Paradise" -

When Reason Fails (III): Morbid Obama Intoxication

Continued from Part II: "The Left's Narrative"

The collective swoon over B. Barak Hussein Muhammed Obama is getting corrosive. If Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) (see parts I and II) was a public health hazard, we ain't seen nothing yet. The Morbid Obama Intoxication (MOI) beats BDS on all fronts.

For a proper understanding we must turn beyond the field of psychology - to philosophy - which explains matters in broad abstracts. As is happens, a number of parameters alarmingly coincide - and here it gets sticky - with the German interbellum.

We all know how that ended. Nota bene, I'm not collating Obama with Adolf Hitler, or lumping him with Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels; although he is playing the campaign like a full-fledged demagogue, the problem rather lies with his fans and admirers.

The American Left is traditionally steeped in pragmatism. That may sound innocent and practical, but it comes with a few less known consequences which seldom come to the fore all at once.

The champion of pragmatism is the American pioneering psychologist William James (1842-1910), who gave the concept its name. The brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James wrote: 'The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving." Dewey applied pragmatism to education.

Pragmatism is a Romanticist version of relativism. Extrovert action and passion are valued over introvert reflexion and reason. Pragmatism is essentially amoral. It has contributed to the nastiness of Postmodernism by positing a sort of secular, Western form of taqqiyah, which is governed by the same principle: our goal is so ethical that even the unethical is justified in reaching it - the aim justifies the means, truth is flexible and depends on the need of the moment, a utility expedient towards realization of the goal.

As a consequence pragmatism is rather dishonestly presented as the opposite of what it aims to achieve. It seemingly is the practical over theory, portends to position the individual in a central role, ostensibly respects reason and facts, while its very principle constitutes an assault on logic (everything is in flux), gives a central role to feelings and passions (subjectivism), denies reality (nothing is absolute), and reduces the individual to an atom of the collective. That collective - in pragmatism is usually 'our generation,' 'liberals,' or 'society'; it is not an aggregate, but an 'organic entity.'

It holds a number of Orwellian concepts, as Hegel's 'Ethical Whole' to which individual free will must be sacrificed for the good of the Collective Will, and Rousseau's notion which has come down to us in Marxism, of 'true freedom through the state'. A picture of mystical group-think is emerging from the Obama campaign which looks ominously familiar, but is by itself not enough to warrant great concern.

Is gets more hazardous when pragmatism is coupled to dogma and subjective passions spiral out of control. This is the winning ticket that made National Socialism such a lethal ideology: they strengthen one another. One can see how that works: our aim justifies the means because we say so. Dogmatism couples blind belief to an already brutal concept. It beckons: stop thinking, follow me and I'll give you what you want so passionately!

If we turn our attention to the Obama campaign we hear one mantra: Change, Action, Belief. The latter represents the dogmatic side: blind faith, not in the Obama ideas (he doesn't have any) but in his method, while Change through Action suggests Will to Power: the dogmatic approach to a subjective aim that justifies the pragmatist means.

There is the negative myth as summed up in part II by Front Page Magazine author Ben Johnson's "The Left's Fairy Tale," a shortlist of the main delusions that the Dems and the Leftist world at large have convinced themselves of. The demonization of George Bush is not a Sorelian myth, but it lends sufficient fire and motivation to reach the goal: getting Obama into 'our' White House.

Sit tight for Leonard Peikoff quoting Herman Goerring in "The Ominous Parallels" (Meridian, 1982, p. 55):

"Just as the Roman Catholic Church considers the Pope as infallible (...) so do we National Socialists believe with the same inner conviction that for us the Leader is (...) simply infallible. [Hitler's authority derives from] something mystical, inexpressible, almost incomprehensible which this unique man possesses, and he who cannot feel it instinctively will not be able to grasp it at all."

If you think that's tacky, compare that to this load of Postmodern 'spirituality,' according to which Obama is both the infallible Pope and the celestial Leader rolled into One:

"Barack Obama isn't really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway. (...) The appeal, the pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of the culture normally completely unaffected by politics? No, it's not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn't have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity. Dismiss it all you like, but I've heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who've been intuitively blown away by Obama's presence - not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence - to say it's just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores, with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord. Here's where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul. The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare."

Mark Steyn noticed it too: "Obama the humble savior:" "I face this challenge with profound humility (...) limitless faith (...) I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal … . This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation." It's a good thing he's facing it with "profound humility," isn't it? ... Yeah, and divorced from reason ...

- Continued in Part IV: "Fulfil My Needs"

- Filed on Articles in "The Political Pathology Page" -

The Medina Precedent for Holocaust and Genocide

An article by Alyssa Lappen in World Net Daily reviewing Andrew Bostom's book "The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History" shot back into memory the matter of our as yet unsubstantiated theory on the origins of antisemitism.

The figure linking Islam, Nazism and mass murder is Haj Amin al Husseini, who was an uncle of Yassir Arafat and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem until 1974.

Pearls of Wisdom has done a great job in compiling a biography which we have reproduced here in a separate post for fear is losing it.

Like so many the blogger subscribes to the line that Nazism introduced antisemitism and anti-Western Jihadism into Islam. Rather, given the sequence of events it must have been the other way around. Bostom's book also aims at repudiating that claim. The historical perspective needs adjustment beyond the last century.

- Caption: The infamous cover of the "Wiener Illustrierte" Magazine, of Al Husseini inspecting a division of Bosnian Storm Troopers , known as the Handzar -

It would seem that the Jews of Medina's rejection of Islam and their subsequent slaughter at the hand of Mohamed was used as a fateful precedent. The actions by Mohamed may well have been invoked by Al Husseini to justify the Ottoman genocidal persecution of Greeks and Armenians in the aftermath of World War I.

Also it may have inspired the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. The common denominator on the scene is Al Husseini, and the Muslim view how proper dhimmis are expected to behave: either die, convert, or pay under the condition of strict loyalty to the master religion.

An important part of Adolf Hitler's justification of the persecution of Jews was his accusation of treasonous behavior during World War I, the so-called Dolchstoss Legend which has as much reality status as the Russian Czarist "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," both having the status of Sorelian myths (see posting "At it again: Political Myths - God nor Reason", of which Leonard Peikoff writes in "The Ominous Parallels": "A 'myth,' in the Sorelian-Fascist-Nazi sense, is not a deliberate falsehood; it is an ideology concocted for the purposes of action (...) it is addressed not to man's capacity for reason, but to a mob's lust for faith, not to the fact-seeking intellect, but to the feeling-ridden, action-craving 'will.' [p. 58]).

The Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians were likewise accused of acts unbecoming their dhimmi status in the Ottoman Empire, during World War I when the Turks fought on the side of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria.

Here's Lappen on Bostom:

World Net Daily: "Exposed: Innate Islamic loathing for Jews," by Alyssa Lappen

(...) several Middle East and Islamic scholars have repeatedly asserted that 20th and 21st century Islamic anti-Semitism sprang solely from Nazi and European Christian influence. Even now, Islamophiles like Bernard Lewis preach (as it were) that virulent Jew-hatred is not inherent to Islam – but rather, anti-Semitism migrated to the Middle East with European colonialism. The Quran uses "hard words ... about the Jews," even Lewis admits. Yet under Islamic rule, he claims they were "only rarely subject to persecution" and "their situation was never as bad as in Christendom at its worst. ..." (...)

Dr. Andrew G. Bostom's extensive, scientific and largely unprecedented new book, "The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History," definitively disproves such claims. (...) they can no longer shamelessly blame Christianity as the sole source of anti-Semitism – or more importantly, that Islam does not and never had its own innate brand of loathing for the Jewish people. Islam detests non-Muslims generally – whom sharia laws institutionally oppress and tax as underclass "dhimmis" – but inveighs especially intense odium against Jews. (...) >>>


- Filed on Articles in "The Unholy Alliance" -

"Pomo goes to Washington D.C."

The reactions to President Bush's "Munich" speech at the Knesseth are an indication that the Postmodern position prevailing in the Democrat camp is badly understood. It goes unnoticed, is spin-doctored out of consciousness, or is remedied by the method the Dems know best these days, denial. Some Republicans, like Ann Counter make a second career out of Democrat Pavlovian knee jerks.

This is especially surprising as B. Barack Obama is a typical and rather vocal exponent of the pseudo philosophy - or more precisely - the malignant political ideology based on false axioms. His rhetorical style, his choices, and the people he is surrounding himself with, all betray true intentions.

Those who cannot get a grip on what all that means might be helped by visualizing a more revealing term: cultural Marxism. Postmodernism is nothing short of Marxist theory with a contemporary slant, a form of evolved Communism by the back-door.

Obama is also heavily influenced by the theology of black liberation, based on the call to revolution by Frantz Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth." Whereas Islamism has incorporated it in its theofascist doctrine, a succession of Popes have thrown it out as heretic (the corruption of religion by Marxist dialectical theme-weaving). Another softer variety of this religious dialectic is circulating these days around the pulpits of the Emergent Churches.

The Left have thoroughly radicalised over the last decade and reverted to pre-revolutionary mode. We do well to remind ourselves that the long road through the institutions is now over and that the boomer fellow-travellers are currently arriving at the corridors of power.

If their position at times seems a little erratic, one is reminded who is The Enemy. Keeping in mind that the classical, traditional, Western 'white, heterosexual male' edifice of power as symbolized by capitalism and liberal democracy is the ultimate target, things usually fall nicely into place.

Those who delude themselves that the inauguration of President B. Barack Obama will not cause a paradigm shift in favour of a global Utopian collective, had better think again. If the likes of Ahmadinejad and Assad c.s., and Messrs Chavez and Castro aren't adorning the steps of the White House come November, this is entirely due to keeping up appearances.

Postmodern philosophy is not based on life in the actual world, but on a fantasy how life should have been hadn't God (or Nature) done such an imperfect job. Instead of wonder, they find fault everywhere.

Just how essential the rift is, is voiced by Ayn Rand's foremost interpreter Leonard Peikoff: "The battle for the world is not a battle between two political ideals. It is a battle between two views of the nature of thought." Here we have the false Left-Right dichotomy to a T.

One result of anti-modern thought is for example that the ethics of objective good and evil have been relativized out of existence and have been replaced by the ethics of deontology - or good-intent-bad-result-never-mind morality, the Left's permanent get-out-of-jail card.

This means that whatever evil flows from their collectivist actions (100 million dead for example), this will nevertheless be referred to as 'highly ethical', seen perhaps as a freak accident of specific circumstances, or blamed on a leader who 'misinterpreted' the otherwise perfect theory.

Parley with evil-doers is simply pragmatism in the good cause of a political settlement. A compromise with Hitler, on how many might partake in the Holocaust - six million or only half that number - views negotiations with evil for the least bad option as a positive virtue. The false axioms lead them away from the truth that the good has nothing to win from the bad, and that evil has everything to gain from the good.

On that note leaving you with today's Times Online article on the subject of the 'appeasement speech' and a prediction that the presence of the aforementioned dictators will be felt well before President Obama's first year in office is out. Vote wisely.

Pricked by CassandraTroy with Nomao

Long overdue! - Filed on Articles in "The Pomo White House" -