Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Left Goes Ape

We've covered this kind of article before in looking at the anti-humanism of the fascist ecology movement. This, however, does come as a bit of a surprise, topping all the weird rubbish the fascist Left has dropped on the world in the past hundred years. Not to worry. They'll likely top this one. There's always tomorrow.
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Socialists: Give apes human rights

Spain Herald

The Spanish Socialist Party will introduce a bill in the Congress of Deputies calling for "the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings." The PSOE's justification is that humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans.

The party will announce its Great Ape Project at a press conference tomorrow. An organization with the same name is seeking a UN declaration on simian rights which would defend ape interests "the same as those of minors and the mentally handicapped of our species."
According to the Project, "Today only members of the species Homo sapiens are considered part of the community of equals. The chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan are our species's closest relatives. They possess sufficient mental faculties and emotional life to justify their inclusion in the community of equals."
http://www.spainherald.com/3438.html
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The Left is an evil joke. To suggest that more EUrocrats and UN supervisors will save mokeys from whoever is to miss the point entirely: it is that reason will prevail in spite of government controllers. Laws from the Left aren't for the good, they are against the people. The Left, dear reader, THEY HATE YOU.
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"The Retreat of Reason"...

I'm still reading this 100 page indictment of Political Correctivism, The Retreat of Reason: Political Correctness and the Corruption of Public Debate in Modern Britain (pdf) by Anthony Brown, but I wanted to get it out to y'all.

The Author Summarizes His Work Thus:
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Summary

For centuries Britain has been a beacon of liberty of thought, belief and speech in the world, but now its intellectual and political life is in chains.

Members of the public, academics, journalists and politicians are afraid of thinking certain thoughts. People are vilified if they publicly diverge from accepted beliefs, sacked or even investigated by police for crimes against received wisdom. Whole areas of debate have been closed down by the crushing dominance of the moralistic ideol-ogy of political correctness.

Political correctness started as a study of cultural Marxism in Germany in the 1920s, and was adopted by the 1960s counter culture, eager to promote tolerance and alternatives to the conservative values of the time.

Political correctness quickly infiltrated US academia and spread its tentacles across the West. By the early twenty-first century, political correctness had completed its long march through the institutions in Britain, and had ensnared almost all of them, from schools to hospitals, from local government to national government, and from major corporations to the police, army and the church. In 1997, Britain became governed for the first time by a government largely controlled by politically-correct ideol-ogy.

Its influence has spread across the entire policy range, not just women's pay and race relations, but education, health, law and order and the environment. It is upheld by a powerful array of lobby groups, from Liberty to Amnesty International, from Friends of the Earth to Refu-gee Action, and an array of domestic and international laws, charters and treaties.

Starting as a reaction to the dominant ideology, it has become the dominant ideology. It defines the terms and parameters of any national debate. Anything that is not PC is automatically controversial. Across much of the public sphere, it has replaced reason with emotion, subordinating objective truth to subjective virtue.

In the early days, political correctness brought benefits as it helped spread decency and consideration to the more vulnerable members of society, from the handicapped to women to ethnic minorities.

But, as political correctness spread and deepened its influence, it became more dogmatic and intolerant of dissent, until it became a betrayal of the very liberalism that first fuelled it. It has lead to new political censorship laws being introduced to curb freedom of speech, and membership of legal democratic parties being curtailed. Rather than opening minds, it is closing them down.

The aim of political correctness is to redistribute power from the powerful to the powerless. It automatically and unquestioningly supports those it deems victims, irres-pective of whether they merit it, and opposes the powerful, irrespective of whether they are malign or benign. For the politically correct, the West, the US and multinational corporations can do no good, and the developing world can do no wrong.

Political correctness is often ridiculed, but it is more than just a joke. With its earlier benefits already won, it has now become a hindrance to social progress, and a threat to society. By closing down debates, it restricts the ability of society to tackle the problems that face it.

PC promoted multiculturalism in the Netherlands while silencing debate about its drawbacks, until the results exploded in religious violence leaving much of the country living in fear. In Britain, it allowed the creation of alien-ated Muslim ghettoes which produce young men who commit mass murder against their fellow citizens. By promoting the rights of criminals over their victims, it hinders law enforcement and leads to escalating crime. By challenging the authority of teachers, it fuels poor discipline in schools, and by promoting equality over excellence, it degrades the standard of education and inflates exam grades until they become almost mean-ingless.

By silencing debate and curbing objective analysis, political correctness can harm those it intends to help. The victims are taught to blame others for their vulnerability, discouraging them from taking responsibility for improv-ing their lives if their problems are self-inflicted.

Black communities are encouraged to blame racist teachers for the failure of their boys at school, rather than re-examine their own culture and attitudes to education that may be the prime reasons. The poor sick have ended up having worse healthcare in Britain than they would in mainland Europe because PC for long closed down debate on fundamental NHS reform. Women's employment opportunities can be harmed by giving them ever more rights that are not given to men. The unemployed are encouraged to languish on benefits blaming others for their fate. Poor Africans are condemned to live in poverty so long as they and their governments are encouraged to blame the West for all their problems, rather than confronting the real causes of poor governance, corruption and poor education.

Political correctness once had a purpose, but it now causes much more harm than good. For the last few decades, reason has been in retreat—but the time has come for reason to advance once again.
Permalink
Why gunbloggergeeks kick ass.
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Don't complain. You vote and then expect the world of politics to go on as if you mattered, and that is the individual's choice of reaction. You must be involved all the time, as an actor in your own life. If you are not, if you refuse, then you eat the crap you get.

10 comments:

Pastorius said...

Dag,
What more can one do than vote, keep informed, blog, write letters to congressmen, and donate money to PAC's?

Still we are not represented.

I refuse to take responsibility for something over which I have no control. Only a masochist would do such a thing.

Oh yes, and for any other readers, this is a continuation of a conversation which began yesterda, at my blog.

truepeers said...

The reason (at least in part) the left goes crazy is they have no idea where their ideas originaly come from, and so have no idea of their ideas' purpose; and so they take them to extremes as their ideas become ends in themselves.

Ask a leftist where does his idea of equality or rights come from and he will probably tell you about some genius theoretician of the Englightenment. If he goes a little deeper, he might invoke the model (for thinkers like Jack Rousseau) of primitive tribes where a relative equality and ritually-dictated rights dominated the scene; but he will not be able satisfactorily to explain why primitive tribes are like that, i.e. what it was about the moment of human creation that led to such societies that are quite unlike the pecking order hierarchies of our ritual-less ape cousins.

Ultimately, that which makes us human, i.e. beings with a core moral intuition about human equality - e.g. in most circumstances, killing a fellow human is a sin, even when starving, while killing an animal is not - and the imperative of reciprocity, and beings with the capability of asserting that our rights come from a creator or from the creation, is not something the left can explain. Being at war with religion, they have never taken seriously the need to dwell on what makes us specifically human; rather, they want to assimilate the human to the natural in a victory for a materialist worldview. And the further they push the idea, the less sense they can make of the human world in which they live.

Denying animals human rights isn't arrogant and cruel; it is ascribing human qualities to our animal cousins that is.

Dag said...

I have some idea of Truepeers' thesis, and for what my opinon is worth, I am fascinated by it.

I recommend to those who wish to follow the argument that they watch covenantzone

If I blew that link I'll try agian so you may copy and paste manually.

Dag said...

my title

Stogie said...

Dag, well the Democrats and Leftists are always looking for new voting constituencies. As soon as they convince the apes they are victims and deserve free bananas for life, they will then introduce legislation to give them the vote.

Always On Watch said...

Dag,
As I told Pastorius yesterday, I had to read this story twice before I could believe such a wacko thing was happening.

Your analysis is spot-on! Political correctness is beyond farce with this one.

Stogie has a point: the left is pandering for votes.

Pastorius said...

Pandering for the give-apes-citizenship vote?

Forgive, I can't understand the idea. I think I am sane, or something.

Dag said...

Some, even many, intellectuals get credit from the masses simply because the masses are impressed by the titles and status of intellectuals, thinking that if one is an intellectual one must be smart and sensible and perhaps even right in ones ides and pronouncements. "Experts" get much credit, credit being that which they do not have in hand, like a credit card, that not being money but something one will pay at a later time on trust. We are now more and more able to challenge the intellectual expert class and demand an accounting of their abilities to pay and provide valid currencies. Simply being an expert andintellectual is no longer a right to credit. The endless deferral of payment and the demands of further credit is now incresingly seen as bogus, as a cheat, as a danger. It's time for our intellectuals to use some cash in the marketplace of idea. Bloggers are cutting off the credit usually available to the exprets.

We would some few years ago have moaned alone in the knowledge that our public intellectuals were promoting Ape Rights. We might have sat at the library and talked to our fellows aobut it, thinking they'd gone even stupider than usual, and we'd have sat waiting for the next election in the hope of exposeing them as phonies and fools. Now, with blogs, we can jump on them immediately and demand some accountablity on the spot. The dialogue of geniuses in backrooms is not the nature of politics any longer. Now they can bloody well pay for their stupidities on the spot.

Blogging isn't enough. We have ot stand up in public and use blogs as the way to organise that stand. The people have a way now of uniting on the spot and voicing an opinion and of demanding correction and payment. No more credit to the intellectually and morally bankrupt. It's time to make the bastards pay.

Pastorius said...

I see your point. People in the street is the politicians biggest fear, isn't it?

Dag said...

People at the dairy counter at the local supermarket saying "This, that, the other thing." That is what frightens our politicians. Ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary places, that is the trick for us to pull off. I'm not a street demonstrator, and few of us are. Yes, I will stand on the corner shouting if it comes to it, but I'm more likely to sit in a livbrary chatting with fellows from the community of scholars and the local diner. It's when our attitudes and opinions are the talk of the office that we'll start to make progress. Our ideas have to be ordinary and we, ordinary people, have to speak them so others will know we are normal and reasonable and that they too agree with ordinary and reasonable.

No more monkey nonsense from experts. People are able to sense the stupidities even if they aren't articulate enough to debate college professors in public. We need people with common sense and basic Human decency to lead our nations. Enough of the gnostic phantasies of the Left dhimmi dystopians. I want to sit at the diner and hear ordinary people speak the truth out loud about the realities of life. What does monkey rights have to do with Joe Taxi-driver? It's an insult to all of us. No more acquiescence. Speak up when we hear nonsense. Let people know that stupid is stupid even when experts say it. These fools are not special. Ordinary people are special. We are Humanity. We count. We are the purpose of life!