The left will mount the expected disinformation campaign to confuse people that “honour killings” are just a general part of violence against women, the cure for which is greater social intervention in private lives by police and the ‘caring’ professions, plus more social spending on the same client groups.

The appeal in the Shafia case will attempt to throw sand in everyone’s eyes in this regard, seeking to de-legitimate the analysis of honour killing.

Aisha Gill, in the Guardian, writes the following confused nonsense, which will be a template for the Left to avoid the issue of Islam:

“Yet, by focusing on the subject of honour, such violence is too often explained away by cultural stereotypes – allowing society to dismiss these cases as something that only happens in minority communities with their “outdated” notions of justice. This allows us to completely overlook that, first and foremost, these cases are of violence against women, and the concept of honour is being used to legitimate the continued oppression of women.”

The two ideas are perfectly consistent. We are completely aware that the vast majority of honour crimes are Muslim in origin, followed by Hindus enforcing caste sensitivities. This is not a “stereotype”; this is an observation of fact. And yes, we are completely aware that these murders are intended to control women and prevent them from marrying whom they love or choose.

She goes on:

There is a tendency in the west to see so-called honour killings as exclusively related to specific cultural traditions. [Yes, we do, because they are] They are often depicted as culturally specific to Muslim communities although they are not, in fact, restricted to any particular religion, culture, type of society or social stratum[The lack of restriction does not affect the fact that they are disproportionately committed by Muslims] In its report on harmful practices, for instance, the charity Imkaan reported a case of a Traveller woman forced to leave her community due to “honour-based violence”.

Now watch the sand being thrown in your eyes in what follows:

“Yet there is a widespread belief that honour is no longer as important in western societies, what with their emphasis on individual rights and legality. However, the modern-day importance of “honour” should not be so quickly cast aside. In the UK data from the British Crime Survey 2009/2010 suggests that nearly a million women experience at least one incident of domestic abuse each year, while close to 10,000 women are sexually assaulted every week – how many of these cases relate to the “honour” of the perpetrators being allegedly besmirched by victims and survivors?” [You do it too, you nasty white people!]

Merely by asking a fatuous question does not turn interpersonal violence, even male-female violence,  into a culturally approved tradition of killing daughters who consort with males in any way before marriage. Honour killing is the enforcement of the idea that the penalty for unchastity is gruesome death of the daughters, sisters, or other females relatives,even if the unchastity was involuntary, such as rape, especially incestuous rape. Further, these killings are approved by other female members of the family. The last honour killings in Western societies died out in the 1840s, and they were called duels, exclusively fought by successful males of equal rank in formalized contests of bravery.

Watch how  Aisha Gill’s specious analysis shifts the blame from tribalism and Islam to feminism in the following:

“Tackling “honour” killings requires a shift in political thinking. Instead of regarding them as a cultural tradition common to a range of “backward” societies, the issue needs to be seen in the context of violence against women and the inequality found throughout society.

Instead of soft-pedalling the Islamic, Hindu and tribal nature of the phenomenon, let us call it by its true name: barbarism. Why are we importing these people?

The Telegraph reports: 

“He says he does not regret these actions. That is of course a message that is difficult to convey, but he is very clear on this point … He believes it was necessary,” Geir Lippestad told the TV2 News Channel.

But this week we read headlines which may be of fundamental importance. The second experiment has demonstrated that neutrinos have moved faster than light. If this proves to be true and not merely the artefact of the experiment or observational bias, then the foundations of physics have just taken a five megaton hit.

So what is staying the same this month?

Eurozone crisis - same, but worsening.

Islamic inability to behave democratically? – same, but the evidence keeps coming in, all of which is ignored in the MSM picture of the world.

[Man-caused] global warming hysteria – the nails keep being driven in to that coffin, but the zombie keeps escaping.

My apologies to readers – job pressures have kept me from blogging lately. Happy is the blogger with a day job.

You will hear more about racialized persons, because the word acts like a dumptruck, transporting a host of grievance-mongering from one site of public discourse to another, without the bother of thought. Sort of like the German High Command sending Lenin to Russia in a sealed train, to get the bacillus out of Geneva and into the prostrate body of Tsarist Russia, where it could really do some damage. (I digress)

Wikipedia says:

Racialization refers to processes of the discursive production of racial identities. It signifies the extension of dehumanizing and racial meanings to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group. Put simply, a group of people is seen as a “race”, when it was not before.

This led me to the fascinating entry by the University of Guelph on the subject, Understanding Racialization:

In the past, race was defined as a natural or biological division of the human species based on physical distinctions including skin colour and other bodily features. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white. It was used to establish a classification of peoples. Some of the greatest atrocities in human history have been associated with notions of racial superiority.

There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them. It is now recognized that notions of race are primarily centered on social processes that seek to construct differences among groups with the effect of marginalizing some in society.

While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society. The process of social construction of race is termed racialization.

I would say that these three paragraphs contain the essence of the leftist falsehoods that dominate public discourse.

Read the following and inform yourselves:

1. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white.

False. All people at all times have been conscious of racial differences, and “race” did not emerge in post-16th century Europeas an intellectual construct any more than height or weight did. Race, ethnicity, tribehood: each and all have been observed facts of life since before conscious thought, just as rabbits differ from hares, or both from deer. The intellectuals of Enlightenent Europe may have systematized the classifications, but they systematized classifications of everything: taxonomy and species collecting was the fashion of the time, viz. Linnaeus and the modern biological classification system.

The 4,000 year old pictographs of ancient Egypt show Africans and caucasians as recognizable races. The Romans pondered the origin of races as they looked upon the red-haired Scythians and the Negroid Nubians, and considered the origin of races as related to available sunlight in their native lands.

2. There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification.

False. Humans have evolved. (Darwin is apparently a new idea in some quarters). They are evolving still, at an accelerating rate. Races emerged as Africans left the African continent and colonized the rest of the world in a process starting about 50,000 years ago, settling areas where neanderthals had been before them.

• The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, by Spencer Wells
• Race: The Reality of Human Differences, by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele
• Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, by Nicholas Wade
• The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending
• Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, by Philippe Rushton

Racial differences are real, genetic, unfolding in time, and evidenced by both organic processes and statistically-validated behavioral differences. I noted that the list of books above range in political acceptability from The Journey of Man, which has a PBS television series attached to it, to Philippe Rushton’s, which you can only get from non-Amazon booksellers. But they all say the same thing in different ways.

All humans who left Africa in ancient times are the products of adaptation to new environments, and various genetic compromizes have occurred over time to allow us to live in Asia, Polynesia, Europe, and the Americas.

3. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them.

False. Stephen Jay Gould’s Marxist beliefs led him to to emphasize the commonlaity of our species-hood over the fuzzy distinctions of race. He has been debunked elsewhere. See readings above, but more particularly, see Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, for the more general attack on Gould’s bioogical ideas.

4. While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society

“The social construction of race”. Of all the untruths taught in universities, perhaps none is more pernicious for the long-term than the denial of the biological. It has the effect of placing racial tolerance on the false premise that there are no races. Since there are no races, in this view, race is a social construct. Hence “racialized ethical vegans” can become a race – a category of people able to suffer “racialization.” You do not have to be a race to suffer discrimination. People will and do discriminate about anything, frequently for the benefit of human society. (e.g. the fridge is filthy- clean it. Pick up your mess. Get a job. Change the oil in your car) Trillions of discriminations keep civilization working.

Understand this: tolerance has no meaning or moral worth if there are not real differences to be tolerated. Toleration is a political bargain to make society livable without the need for an established religion.

“There’s a reason Winston Churchill was a better wartime leader than Neville Chamberlain. There’s a reason why the Tea Party got itself elected in under two years, while Occupy Wall Street is kinda all over the place. There’s a reason why we have scores of environmental groups that often can’t see eye to eye. There’s a reason, as George Lakoff and others have noted, why Democrats (and scientists!) focus too much on policy facts and details rather than winning over people’s hearts (and winning elections).

“But when it comes to determining what’s true about complex, technical subjects—issues full of ambiguity and uncertainty, where you can’t just jump to conclusions and have to stay open-minded and tentative in your beliefs—I’ll take the scientific-liberal approach any day. And after reading the book, I think so will you.”

The “scientific-liberal” approach? Methinks something huge is being assumed here, that the scientific method is fully consistent with liberal political values, in the American sense of the word “liberal”.

As Geoffrey Miller wrote in his book Spent (worth a read), people have been found to differ along six different axes. These results are robust, and represent what psychological testing has been able to show in its century-long development.

One of the axes of difference is openness. It is generally true that people who identify with conservative positions will be less open to novelty than people who identify with left-wing positions. Likewise, conservatives will generally be found to be more sociable, or agreeable, than liberals (in the American sense of that term). Thus conservative people generally place a higher value of manners, and less on autheticity, than the expressive individualist.

The full range of differences is given by the mnemonic gocase:

• g for general intelligence
• o for openness
• c for conscientiousness
• a for agreeability
• s for stability
• e for extraversion

Each of this characteristics is fully independent of the other. A person can be thoroughly open, say, and highly disagreeable; highly conscientious, but psychologically unstable. For example, I am rather more open than closed to new ideas and hence should be a liberal, but score lower on the agreeability scale, so I don’t particularly want to keep quiet at the dinner party regarding say, the usefulness of Canada’s gun registration. So I can come across as an argumentative conservative while passing the joint, so to speak.

And you have your own balance of quirks that makes you who you are. It may well be that people who are conservative react more emotionally than people who call themselves liberals, and “liberals” (a most misleading term) may have greater capacity for dealing with ambiguous information. This is the thrust of one of Mooney’s guest columnists, Andrea Kuszewski.

“So—for liberals to make a case for an idea or cause, they come armed with data, research studies, and experts. They are convinced of an idea if all the data checks out–basically they assign meaning and value to ideas that fit within the scientific method, because that’s their primary thinking style. Emotion doesn’t play as big of a role in validation. Not to say that liberals are unfeeling, but just more likely to set emotion aside when judging an idea initially, and factor it in later. Checks out scientifically = valuable. Liberals can get just as emotionally attached to an idea, but it’s usually not the primary trigger for acceptance of an idea.”

Here is where the conflation of openness with scientific method comes in.

The conservative is the one being accused of emotional attachment to wrong ideas, in the case of resistance to man-caused global warming.

Yet the case for or against man’s role in global warming is patently not about facts at all. It is a religious narrative. Conservatives can smell religion at a hundred yards. Liberals, to make as silly a case as Mooney’s, are less aware that they are gripped by a gnostic religious narrative.

Man is bad. He is destroying the planet. Something should be done. And we have the knowledge, intelligence and commitment to save the planet from those nasty people who are enjoying themselves as Gaia expires.

One of the most impressive features of any discussion with a warmist is their passionate belief that those who oppose them must be evil. They have perfect knowledge – it is undisputable. Hence those who oppose them must be either ignorant, and needing education, or knowledgable, and therefore consciously bad.

So don’t talk to me of liberals’ greater capacity for handling ambiguity and lessened emotional reaction to policy. If that is so, I have not met one in a long life in politics. They are passionately anti-factual on any issue of concern to them, because their (largely unconscious) religious narrative determines what is factual.

David Stove is my philosophical hero. His work is trenchant, profound, anti-leftist, and surprisingly funny. He was, alas, an atheist, not of the Dawkins type -militantly intolerant – but a convinced atheist nonetheless. As a Christian I have very little sympathy for the atheistical interpretation of life. It often seems to forget it is merely an interpretation, rather than a proven reality. We believers know that we believe, rather than know, that some kind of superintending being has created this universe, and every other imaginable. Atheists seem to forget that there is no evidence whatever for the absence of God apart from one’s interpretation of events, and that one’s interpretaion is itself a choice, rather than a demonstrable fact.

Consequently it is consistent with my view of life that Stove fell apart when faced with his own death. I am not claiming that I have any superior virtue or courage than Stove. I merely believe that I am endowed with a soul which somehow survives death, and even if I do not, I am still very grateful for my time on earth.

Here is a portion of his obituary:

“As a teacher, he again drew mixed reactions. If average students found him unexciting, the better ones delighted in him. His students were, on the whole, less concerned than his colleagues by the extremity of some of his opinions. He showed that the range of what could reasonably be thought was wider than one had imagined; at his best, logical consequence could seem putty in his hands.

“He gave permission, so to speak, to think outside the mainstream – if reasons for doing so could be found. Through his encouragement a generation of students found their own voices. His tolerance of views other than his own (if well argued) was more genuine than that of many thinkers who proclaimed tolerance as a principle.

“Of all modern enthusiasms, perhaps the only one he had sympathy with was conservation. He greatly admired those who had preserved stretches of the NSW coastal bush from development. At his Mulgoa property, he planted trees and enjoyed the calming pleasure of cricket, baroque music, old books and especially his family. He died there, after suffering the effects of cancer treatment for some months.”

An appreciation of his life and work was published by Roger Kimball, and is worth a read.

Here is a quote from Kimball’s appreciation of David Stove:

“Impressed by the snippets that Mr. Windschuttle quoted—and by the arguments that he recapitulated—I scared up a copy of the book[Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists]. It was a revelation. With a combination of dazzling philosophical acumen and scarifying wit, Stove does for irrationalism in Karl Popper’s philosophy of science (and that of such heirs as Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend) what the Romans did for Carthage in the Third Punic War: he assaults and destroys it utterly. It had been a long time since I had read a book of philosophy as entertaining and illuminating as Popper and After. An Australian friend to whom I mentioned my enthusiasm recommended Darwinian Fairytales, Stove’s posthumously published attack on the absurdities of Darwinism, especially as it was applied to human beings. I found Darwinian Fairytales every bit as absorbing as Popper and After: an invigorating blend of analytic lucidity, mordant humor, and an amount of common sense too great to be called “common.” Once I started it, I could hardly put it down. But who, I wondered, was David Stove? How had his work escaped me all these years?”

There was once a comedy skit of two guys talking about women and sex, with shopping carts loaded with diapers in the aisles of Costco, with floor to ceiling boxes of diapers surrounding them. It slowly dawns on us that sexual activity leads to something quite different from the ecstatic communion of sexual bliss. It leads to little copies of yourself who strangely differ from you and your mate, wondering about the world, demanding lunch and entertainment. It also frequently leads to marriage, and eventually, depending on your choice of mate, divorce and custody arrangements.

As to the amazing and by no means obvious relationship of sex to reproduction I am not alone in wondering.

Sex at Dawn joins the growing ranks of books on human nature, as seen through an evolutionary perspective. It is subtitled “How we mate, why we stray, and what it means for modern relationships”. It covers some of the same ground as Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn and Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind, albeit from different perspectives.
Anthropologists and biologists are asking how it is that man has come to dominate the planet, and what critical differences distinguish man from the other four great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and gibbons.

We have gone in the space of a several hundred thousand years from chipping rocks on the African plains to colonizing every available part of the planet. How this has occurred is, in effect, the Question. What mechanisms, what processes, could have caused to domesticate and transform ourselves in such a brief timespan as 150,000 years?

Apparently it has to do with sex. Our sex lives are essential to our rapid evolution. Many people are repelled by that answer, but according to Darwin, there are only two ways of doing it: natural selection and sexual selection.

As Geoffrey Miller puts, only sexual selection is directed, rapid and intelligent enough to have produced us, because natural selection, in the Darwinian sense, is too slow and random to have moved us up the food chain from dimwitted rock shapers of 400,000 years ago to people able to play Bach and appreciate it. That means women have selected men to be as they are: capable of violence but good around the kids, able to bring home the bacon, and faithful enough to be tolerated. And women have been selected by men to be as they are: good with kids, able to forage for themselves and the family, handy, beautiful (no facial hair please), and smart enough to appreciate our jokes.
This is a depressing conclusion for those who imagine the perfectibility of man is only held up by the existence of bad social structures (economic and religious arrangements). It is of no consequence to those who believe that man – in whatever condition he then was – received revelation as to how he should behave.

Sex includes better brains, which offer more entertainment value, bigger dicks and more beautiful chicks, and cleverer, more emotionally engaged men and women loving one another. I could have written that differently, but that is the main conclusion of Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind. We have conquered the planet by being smarter, which has entailed and caused us to be more sexy, to be more rapidly reproductive, and to share the burdens of reproduction better as between men and women.

We are each the result of sexual selection. Men have been selected by women, and women by men, and what you experienced in your mate selection days is what everyone has gone through. And, by and large, despite the fact that less than one percent of our sexual activity is aimed at reproduction, we have populated the planet with ourselves quite effectively.

This brings us to the controversy dealt with in Sex at Dawn. How much were we ever intended to be sexually faithful?

This issue bedevils our understanding of ourselves. The time before agriculture spreads backwards from 10,000 years ago into the mists of time. It is in this time that anatomically modern humans emerged, probably about 50,000 to 30,000 years ago. This long period is a sort of blank slate onto which writers project their theories of how we got be so smart and well adapted.

Did the family unit mean that much then? Did we pair-bond for longer than a few years, in order to raise children? Was the family the engine of human survival? Was evolution accelerated by sexual exclusivity, however short term, which is implied in the idea of family?

Or, to the contrary, did people just boink and move on? Did the hunter-gatherer pack or tribe enforce any kind of sexual exclusivity in the days before we had more property than we could carry on our backs? Did men choose sexual exclusivity for some relevant period of time as they supported their mates in breeding? In the absence of accumulation of property, did we have something to defend that made patrilineal relationships a sensible social institution? Did we grow up as a species knowing who our fathers were, and did they and their brothers teach us how to hunt? Or was dad just one of the guys who fucked mother on occasion, and also taught us how to catch fish and shape a spearpoint?
This is the context in which books like Sex at Dawn are written.

Sex at Dawn is engaging in an argument about the family and the pair-bond which lies at the core of it. Essentially it is stating that the human being was not meant for sexual fidelity and it is time we recognized that fact.

The argument goes like this.
1) The behavior of the human species since the invention of agriculture is of no relevance. Since we began to accumulate property (beyond what we could carry on our backs and pack-animals) only with the advent of settled existence, and that only with agriculture, the history of the last 10,000 years reveals nothing of our true nature. It is a distortion caused by property. Property enforces the need to assure ourselves of the fatherhood of our children, and therefore the sexual exclusivity of our pair-bonds.

2) If you want to know about how we behaved sexually before agriculture, compare the human body to those of the other 4 great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and gibbons. The evidence, in the form of penis size and shape, external testicles, female ovulation – whether hidden or evident, shows that we are designed to be sexually promiscuous. The existence in humans of “sperm competition” means that we were and are promiscuous, and that males have fucked women in group situations forever. Sexual exclusivity is a fantasy, a lie we keep telling ourselves.

3) As we pass out of the agricultural epoch, sexual arrangements are starting to leave behind the mould imposed by the property-obsessed homo economicus of the previous era.
As the authors state, “despite centuries of religious and scientific propaganda, the basic illusions underpinning the supposed “naturalness” of the conventional nuclear family are clearly exhausted…we need to seek peace with the truths of human sexuality. Maybe this means improvising new familial configurations” (p.310)

That, in essence is the book. I have rendered it as logically as I could, and spared you the ranting tone and the irrelevant asides on the religious suppression of human sexuality.

To which I respond:

1) The whole thing is an argument against the concept of marital fidelity over the course of a lifetime, fair enough. But who is arguing for marital fidelity over the course of a lifetime? The anthropologists argue merely that the human pair-bond was an engine of our reproductive success, in the raising of children and the transmission of culture to them. So it is pointless to argue about the pair-bond with people who are not saying it was ever wholly exclusive or meant for life.

2) That leaves institutional religion. The Christian Church and Islam have both praised the institution of faithful marriage and repressed sexuality in the interests of family stability. If you had responsibility for the human species in your hands, over the course of centuries, would you argue for anything less? Would your religion make explicit allowance for group sex and seasonal orgies? Point me the way to one such and I might join. But I doubt it would last for centuries, as the sexually repressive ones have.

3) As to improvising new familial configurations, what do you think has been going on for the last fifty years? As soon as we could escape the bonds of one man or woman for life, we have done so. Though the results are not entirely in yet, there is little ground for total confidence that sexual liberation is possible where children are involved. I am not ready to join David Warren in wholly condemning the modern era, but the importance of the family to the welfare of children is a non-negotiable truth, and free-form boinking will always take second place to the requirements of child-rearing. Child-rearing is the twenty to twenty five year mortgage. And if marriage fails, it is always a tragedy, even if leads to better outcomes eventually for the couple engaged in it. How it affects the children is the crucial test, and we do not yet have confidence to say it carries no cost to them. It is a price they pay for their parents’ inability to love one another for a lifetime.

4) Societies are in competition. The improvising of familial configurations in which we have been engaged for fifty years is a novelty. There is no reason to believe the society which engages in it will always prevail against those which suppress sexuality in favour of everyone doing their duty, and out-breeding the pleasure-seeking improvisers of family configurations.

So the advocates of the pair-bond may, with Baronness Thatcher, say that the facts of life are conservative, even if humans were, are and remain a randy bunch of adulterers, group-sex devotees, and polymorphously perverse libertines.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/07/the-cosmopolitan-conservative

“Although liberals like to think that those who remain conservative have somehow evaded or insulated themselves from these challenges, the reality is that conservatives have participated in modernity just as fully.”

“Judge or referee, therapist or manager, the liberal governs from above. This distance—the conviction that liberalism has somehow transcended the nitty-gritty of substantive debate and attained a higher outlook—is what allows the old-fashioned rationalists like Steven Pinker to ally themselves with postmodern skeptics in the liberal establishment. The liberal maintains his distance, exempting himself (or imagining himself exempted) from the agonies of the always morally, metaphysically, and religiously fraught content of important human interactions. It’s this insulating distance, along with a therapeutic understanding of those below them, that encourages unwarranted feelings of superiority. The liberal does not see the conservative as a man or woman with ideas and convictions to be engaged but as a person with prejudices and interests to be diagnosed and treated.”

First Things should be added to your conservative bloglist. You may not be a Roman Catholic, but I frequently find that Catholics are firm on some vital issues. Often to read them is to reinforce one’s intuitions and beliefs with sober and profound reasoning.

For “religion”, substitute “anthropogenic global warming”, “Islam”, “hate speech”, or governmental concern with unwholesome diets.

[Jefferson was writing about the degree of religious toleration in Virginia in 1781, as one of many subjects gathered in what came to be called “Notes on Virginia”, to the Marquis de Marbois, Secretary of the French legation at Philadelphia. The American Revolution was then in progress, and Jefferson living at Monticello, his estate in Virginia].

Notes on Virginia

By Thomas Jefferson

Query XVII

The Different religions received into that State?

“….The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have no authority over such natural rights, only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable to them to our God. The legitimate acts of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. If it be said, his testimony in a court of justice cannot be relied upon, reject it then, and be the stigma upon him. Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man. It may fix him obstinately in his errors, but it will not cure them.

Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only…. If [free inquiry] be restrained now, the present corruptions will be protected, and new ones encouraged.

Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. …

Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men: men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face or stature.

Introduce the bed of Procrustes then, and as there s the danger that the large men may beat the small, make us all of a size, by lopping the former and stretching the latter. Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion.  The several sects perform the office of a censor morum over such other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined imprisoned; yet we have no advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth….

Our sister States of Pennsylvania and New York…have made the happy discovery, that the way to silence religious disputes, is to take no notice of them. Let us too give this experiment fair play, and get rid, while we may, of those tyrannical laws.”

I once shot a family of squirrels who were living in my cottage; they were eating the wiring and shitting over everything. A real and present danger. I shot the mother and, to my surprise,  in succession her pups came out to take a look. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! I still feel badly about it. I don’t ever want to do that again. And those were squirrels.

Shooting fifty, sixty people in cold blood – that is evil. Can you be sane and do this? According the M’Naghten rule for criminal insanity, Breivik is sane: he knew the quality, nature and result of his actions. According to most people’s moral calculus, you cannot kill another child without being insane.

I once said to an old Prussian that I though Hitler was insane. “Was he?” he asked back, in a tone that conveyed to me he thought I was letting Hitler off easy for ascribing insanity to what was plainly evil.

What do you think?

In his editorial, Can Con, the Opera, Corcoran skewers the Canadian content industry: carriers, networks, broadcasters, filmmakers for fleecing the Canadian public for 6o years or more on behalf of “Canadian content”.

“CanCon, the Opera has been running since the early 20th century, when Canadian nationalists seized control of the radio airwaves on the grounds that there were rigid spectrum limitations. Only a couple of dozen radio stations were possible, and they should not be allowed to drift into the monopoly hands of foreigners. Today, even though spectrum and wire communication links are essentially unlimited, and ­entertainment, news, information, data and movies are literally available in limitless quantities, the opera is still running.

“Decades ago they said that because there are technical limits to broadcasting, controls are needed. Now they say that because there are no technical limits, controls are needed. Every new technology — the arrival of television, cable, digital, satellite, Internet — has become a battleground of CanCon special interests seeking to lord it over the Canadian consumer.”

You can read the entire Broadcasting Act without finding mention of the word “consumer”. In a statute with more regulatory objectives than there are letters of the alphabet, there is no mention of the consumer or user interest in communications – namely, what it costs. Consequently the regulator, being a creature of statute, has to strain to consider the impact of his decisions on the paying public.

In this instance Corcoran plays the populist, concerned for the welfare of the common man against those of the rent-seekers at the public trough. He has correctly foreseen that the purchase by the carriers (Bell, Rogers, Shaw) of the broadcasting holdings of everyone else can only be paid for by a) entrenching further the regulatory protection of the Canadian broadcasting industry and b) getting people to pay higher rates for telecommunications so that,  for instance, cellphone rates pay for broadcasting investments.

Now for the bad part of Corcoran. His views of networks are extremely “propertarian”: the owner of the network has the absolute right to determine to what uses it will be put, and to control traffic across it in his own interest exclusively. Thus he rails against the lease of telecom facilities to smaller users as the approaching the advent of communism. Carriers, in this view, should have absolute discretion to attach or not attach any rival system to their networks. Thus when Bell Canada sought to pass on a form of usage based billing onto the consumers of smaller ISPs, Corcoran thought it plain wrong that the Canadian user public rose up against it and sided, as he always does, with Bell Canada.

Let me put the argument about networks this way. They have to be built at great expense and the owners have a right to be paid for them.  No one disputes this. But to argue from metaphor, we have two ways of conceiving networks. One way likens them to railroads, and another to highways. The railroad metaphor says that they are so expensive to build that the rights of the owner to determine what traffic passes across them is near absolute. The only people who should be interconnecting are those who own other railroads, so that we do not end up with expensive duplicate facilities. But the right of the small user to attach a branch line is at the discretion of the larger railroad.

Then there is the highway metaphor. Though both driving and car ownership are highly regulated, the right of the licensed driver to back his car into the street and make use of the highways, without prior notification tothe road owner of his route,and go where he wills, is near absolute.

Moreover, the owner of the property may attach his laneway to the road according to a generally permissive policy of government.

His choice of car must meet the standards of government, not of the road-owner. A private road owner has no right to limit the tye of vehicle passing across his road; only the government does this (e.g. tracked vehicles, heavy trucks in spring).

Our collective problem with the legal theory of communications networks, at least for those concerned with profit and enterprize, is that our legal theories run directly into the public interest in free and open communications networks. In the 18th century British law said that such privately-owned facilities as toll roads and ferries were “affected with the public interest”, and that the rights of ownership were in some sense restricted.

I wish that my learned friend Corcoran, and his many allies in the economics profession, would grasp that simple idea. Networks are for users, not owners. They exist for us. They return profit to their owners. Finding the right balance between these two sets of rights is a legal and regulatory problem which will not go away by the fiat of anyone.

When the Muslims took over the better part of the eastern Mediterranean, they inherited the Greek-speaking portion of what remianed of the Roman Empire. The major seats of Christianity included Alexandria in Egypt, Antioch in what is now Turkey, Byzantium, and Rome. The world they inherited was both prosperous and infused with Greek thought, which was based in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Antioch and Alexandria, two of the four major patriarchates of Christianity fell to Islam, to be joined later by Byzantium in 1453AD.

Around the year 1000AD, a school of thought arose in Islam called the Mu’tazilites. They were Islam’s response to this Greek (Hellene) philosophical tradition. They sought to subject the Quran to the kind of dissection that rational minds engage in. Was the Quran coeval with Allah, as the theologians pretended? Had it existed before all time in the Mind of God? Questions such as these and others were asked and answered, and the theologians were not amused. Fortunately for the philosphers, they had the support of the then Caliph.

Against this philosophizing tendency – which tends to subject revelation to the rules of evidence and reason- arose the great analyst and philosopher Al-Ghazali, who rejected every premise of philosophy in his magisterial work, “The Incoherence of Philosophy”. His influence throughout the Islamic world was as pervasive and powerful in its way as Aristotle has been on ours, and it was wholly negative.

 Essentially al-Ghazali denounced Aristotle and Plato as un-Islamic, and advanced a theory of causality which eliminated all secondary causes. What this meant was that God was directly responsible for everything. By everything I mean every thing, action, appearance, event and manifestation was directly caused by God. No secondary causes exist.  No law of gravity. No three laws of thermodynamics. Nothing. God maintains the world not by law, but by his habit, and nothing constrains him to sustain it or from destroying at any given pico-second.

Thus an arrow shot from a bow did not move according to laws of gravity and aerodynamics, but by God’s absolute will.

Al-Ghazali argued that our reason could not know the world and that God was not reason. God was will, absolutely separate from his creation. God’s absolute independence of his creation could not be diminished in any way. Thus, in the Islamic doctrine, God implanted no part of Himself in human nature, whereas the Jews and Christians believe that they were made in God’s image. The reason we can know the universe or anything in it is that we partake somehow and somewhat of this divine nature. Western science, which is an outgrowth of Christianity,  rests on the belief that the laws of nature exist and are rationally apprehensible.

In the Christian tradition God was the Logos itself – the reason behind the world’s appearances. You may recall the opening of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was that Word. All things were made by it, and without it was nothing made that was made.” “Word” is the inadequate translation of the Greek Logos, which connotes inner logical order.

And further on in the same paragraph, John records: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt aomong us, and we saw the glory of it”.

These two ideas, of man being made in God’s image, and that God was Logos itself, are so deeply embedded in our thought that it is difficult for us to see how they operate. In that sense, Islam gives us clearest picture of what happens to society when different ideas of God, nature and the human capacity for knowledge prevail.

The argument made by Robert Reilly is that al-Ghazali was altogether too influential. For whatever reason, al-Ghazali’s ideas on the incoherence of philosophy, the inadequacy of human reason to understand the world, and the unknowability of God except through revelation, have had a huge, continuing and debilitating effect on Islamic society.

If nature depends immediately on God’s will, why inquire into anything? Indeed, inquiry verges on heresy, disrespect for the Almighty. Everything is “Inshallah” – as God wills. Inquiry is either blasphemous, heretical, or both.

And we ourselves become playthings, motes of dust in the divine whirlwind, rather than actors with moral responsibility. If God directs everything, then there is no standpoint from which man can act independently of God’s will. We cannot reproach God with anything, nor can we act independently of God’s will, and so have things for which we should repent. We are not actors. We are phantasms.

If God is pure will, rather than reason and love, then when humans model themselves on the divine attribute, they model the behaviour that is seen as divine. In the Islamic case, that is pure willfulness, that aspect of man that is like the Divine Essence.

In 2006 I coined the term Allah’s holodeck. This was my intuitive realization that, for the devout Muslim, they experienced themselves as directly moved by God. Thus,  if they robbed a bank and killed the guards, that was as God willed. The only religious  issue was whether they would still be sweating from exertion or fear when they thanked God after the bank robbery, and that issue  of propriety would be decided by shari’a, not by any innate moral sense or reasoning from first principles.

Reilly’s indictment of the baneful effect of Ghazali deserves your attention. He draws direct links between the disparagement of reason by al-Ghazali and the increasing stultification of the Muslim mind, which has been going on for a thousand years.

The UN’s human development report of 2002, written by Arabs themselves, shows the truly dreadful lack of education, publishing, translation, economic development, patents, and intellectual life generally in Arab Islamic lands. The fact that 4 million Finns produce more goods and services than 80 million Arabs is the consequence of the disparagement of reason that al-Ghazali justified.

The  full text of the Arab Human Development Report of 2002 is here.

Reilly cites an expert on Islam who says that “Islamic fundamentalism is not a solution, it is the cry of despair that that the lack of solution is no longer tolerable”.

Reilly’s argument, which I find wholly persuasive, is that the root of  Sunni Islamic problems in the present day is theological and epistemological: meaning, ideas about God and the capacity for knowledge.  They are deep rooted in the triumph of a philosopher who renounced philosophy a thousand years ago, and the society that accepted his views as definitive.

1. It is a religion in either the modern or Christian sense of the word;

2. it is not a political or social project, similar in scope to communism, fascism or parliamentary democracy as different ways of life, but sharing the dimensions of a complete social project, with laws, economic relations, and culture shaped by that project;

3. and that jihad is not one of it sacraments.

If you disagree with any of these propositions you are merely ignorant and I have the cure for your ignorance. Read these books:

Destiny Distrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansari and Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State,  by Tarek Fatah share many traits. Both are written by assimilated western muslims, one of Afghan and the other of Bangladeshi origin.

Both are compendious reviews of the history of Islam and the Islamic world, what Ansari calls the Middle World between China and the Bosphorus, well-written, and highly informative.

Ansari takes a much more friendly tone to his own religion than does Fatah, but the facts are clearly related.

Try to imagine a religion where the followers of the Apostles fought a war with the followers of St. Paul, and executed the losers, where John the Baptist’s family was murdered by followers  of Jesus, where Mary and Joseph died at the hands of followers of St. Paul, and you can begin to capture the flavour of the political turmoil  that is Islam. It begins when the founder of your religion is also the founder of your social community, when the distinction between religion and political structure has no legitimacy, and when no attention has been paid to the question of succession by the founder, when the founder’s vision is explicitly political and social.

That is the thrust of Fatah’s critique of Islam as a religious project: that the Islamic state is an impossibility. After reading it you will feel justified in your anti-Islamism, as you should be, you western liberal, you.

But then you read Ansari and you cannot help but agree with this description:

“From the other (Islamic) side, however, the moral and military campaigns of recent times look like long-familiar programs to enfeeble Muslims in their own countries. Western customs, legal systems and democracy look like a project to atomize society down to the level of individual economic units making autonomous decisions based on rational self interest. Ultimately, it seems, this would pit every man, woman and child against every other, in a competition of all against all for material goods.

“What looks, from one side, like a campaign to secure greater rights for citizens irrespective of gender, looks from the other side, like powerful strangers inserting themselves into the private affairs of families and undercutting people’s ability to maintain their communal selves and familial and tribal networks. In short, what looks from one side like empowering each individual looks, from the other side, like disempowering whole communities.” 

The legitimacy of this observation does not argue that the western liberal world is wrong in how it governs itself. But, it does raise a concern that east is east and wast is west, and that the import of millions of unassimilated communalist, tribal and patriarchal people into advanced liberal democratic states, where the bonds among people are much looser and more voluntary, is troublesome to the point of policy insanity.

They do not have to live here, do they? And if they do, why does anyone think they should not adapt immediately to our ways of doinf things, by force of law, if necessary?

Conclusions first, evidence later. The goal is power, not truth.

Or why the term “climate science” has become an oxymoron.

The hidden history of acid (lysergic acid monohydrate) is like the hidden history of the Masons: enormously influential, out of sight and yet whose results are right in front of your face. Without acid, the sixties would have been creative, as so many were then young; with acid, the sixties denoted a period of transformative creativity, not without considerable damage to social institutions, and yet the step children of the sixties are the computers and networks which have changed our lives. I am given to believe that the transformations of ordinary experience that were first experienced under the influence of pschoactive chemicals led to the creation of personal comouters and the Internet. I cannot prove it, but acid and personal computers all came out of a cultural milieu heaviliy influenced by Owsley Stanley, and the possibilities made evident once the doors of perception were cleansed.

Conservatives and other sensible people will be divided by this issue, as they should be. There are strong arguments for “just say no to drugs”. I would have more respect for that opinion if people who said it would go off their meds, their coffees, and their wine for six months. I suspect however, that a significant proportion of conservatives know what I am talking about, and agree. Your path to enlightenment may have started with a little orange square of cardboard with a darker orange owl in the middle.

Besides which, iand on a lesser note, it appears he lived on a meat and dairy diet, having declared that vegetables were poison. He attributed throat cancer to the broccoli his mother made him eat as a child. Already I can hear some of you hang-’em high conservatves wavering.

Owsley Stanley was a benefactor of mankind. His essays are found here. I think that a recollection of your best trip would be an appropriate thank you.