On Philobarbarism

We have to make fine distinctions in our language to hone our thoughts and our actions based on them. Let's look again at pairs of words: sentiment/sentimentality; science/scientism; morality/moralism/ religion/religiosity; legal/legalistic, to sort out where we go wrong in our sometimes assumed good intentions. We might be too harsh in suggesting that those who are sentimental are also and even perhaps only stupid or cynical or oppressive and vicious. It might well be that sentimentalists are simply badly informed about themselves and life as we live it. Some might be naively bound to evil ideas but be surely convinced their opponents are evil for being at odds. Sincerity, no friend to me, is the standard excuse for the evil behaviour of so many who do so much evil, they being in our time our naive Left fascist dhimmis as a rule.

Where the effects of oft genocidal philobarbarism reign unchecked, in Palestine, for example, the critic of philobarbarism is dismissed as a Rightwing religious bigot. By whom? Oh, let's identify the Presbyterian Church of the USA. Creating conditions that lead to genocide, whether from misplaced and polluted emotionalism or from sheer and murderous cynicism, the result is the same. And so, roughly, is the right treatment to correct this path. Simple ignorance or sophisticated cynicism, the result is the same in that the dead pile up and more arrive daily. The pursuit of sentimentality prevents any end to it till sentimentality itself is destroyed in practice.

Sentimentality is of degrees. One might think of it at its least in the form of a pre-printed Hallmark Greeting Birthday Card: "You are so wonderful that you are special." It's demeaning to all involved, and yet it has its place for those too timid or stupid to write their own timid stupidities on a piece of paper. It does keep the economy revolving at no dear harm.

Let's turn to an example from technology for something a bit more realistic if somewhat creepier:

"Medical schools have gone out of their ways in the past decade to foster a respectful attitude toward gross anatomy lab cadavers. From what I've heard it would be quite difficult, in good conscience, to attend one of these workshops and then proceed to stick a cigarette in your cadaver's mouth or jump rope with it's intestines.... Many of the students gave their cadavers names, 'Not like Beef Jerky. Real names,' said one student." Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. (pp. 38-39.)

While Roach's book is very funny there is not a thing humorous about sentimentality. Allowing one form of collective dishonesty to run rampant is to allow the opening for all others till the collective is rotten inside and out and intellectual honesty is an unknown quality, one that when it might show an occasional appearance is hated and driven out with mad passion. Look at any reasonable critique of the plight of the Gaza Bedouin to prove this point. Or, in the case below, let us turn to the masturbatory antics of a teen-age girl rapt by philobarbarism in the self-created illusion of non-people, Canadian native Indians. It is unfair perhaps to single out one hysterical and sexually dysfunctional teenage girl to make a point but hers is perfect in its lack of sophistication. Below is pure philobarbarism without even a patina of rational sense.
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Ottawa Core said...

[A]s to your thoughtful considerations to alleviate the problems encountered by our hosts (the original people of Canada): a. the current approach, read your history again, is one of absolute bloody annihilation and lustful plunder. Letting the Europeans onto this rock, South and North America is fraught with genocidal glee. Each and every encounter our government (our civilized culture's manner of acting for the greatest good) towards an absolutely foreign entity generated more and more hatred, distrust, and abhorrence. We cannot be the nice guy now or anytime in the future. We are murderers and thieves. A piece of paper, representing a treaty from your brutal master allowing you a speck of land you once wandered freely for thousands of years is foolish and comical if it didn't have so much power to kill behind the native's point of view of our absolute domination over their entire lives. How else could your lives be played out knowing anything you do under this 24/7 rule of law (more self serving paper to state the right to murder and rape more of your people steal more of your land) will land you in trouble. Play along. Wait for the messiah.

The "Indian" race are, from what I have experienced and read, one of the greatest, most enduring, most learned of god's creatures. They have a special place. We all know it. It is their land, to steward as they wish. We must learn from their honour and courage to withstand the greatest warring tribe known to man: The white race.

Our only hope is to get down on our hands and knees and beg for forgiveness from our brothers and sisters of the red race. The healing will come. Not because we deserve forgiveness but due to a better race's power to overcome any and all we can do.
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=19926580&postID=114650647115778889****
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The generous among us will argue that this critter will someday mature and find something better to emote about. I, conversely, assume that she will likely find employment with the Foreign Affairs Dept. in Ottawa. Therein lays the problem we face so directly and immediately today in the Modern West. The sophisticated philobarbarist is in charge of our foreign affairs relations. And everything else. The collective masturbatory phantasy grows till most are involved in it-- to the embarrassment of those who see it for what it is. It is dishonest, it is revolting to be dragged into it, and it ain't never gonna be the real thing. Yet the phantasy prevails because too many feel that "it feels right." Our public discourse and the results therefrom are at best sterile. I argue that our vitiated and phantastically ugly social discourse is evil and murderous in effect.

But what is honesty? What is a real social discourse? We can begin right here with this post. We can turn to Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect. New York: Harper Torchbooks; 1959. :

"Manners are minor morals which facilitate the relations of men, chiefly through words. When those verbal relations are deliberately staged, for no other purpose than pleasure, men find themselves engaged in an intellectual exercise that is one of the delights of life. Manners, therefore, are not solely a clue to the deeper moral assumptions of an age, they are also a strong or weak guardian of Intellect at its most exposed.

[....]

The reader will have noticed that I did not speak of sociable conversation as the exchange, but as the sifting of opinion. [....]

[T]rue conversation sifts opinion, that is, tries to develop tenable positions by alternate statements, objections, modifications, examples, arguments, distinctioins, expressed with the aid of rhetorical arts-- irony, exaggeration, and the rest...." (pp.60-61.)

When we abandon true reason for feel-good sentimentality then we are left without sentiment. When we falsify our expressions we falsify our relations to others. when we accept and perhaps applaud such tripe as "The 'Indian' race are, from what I have experienced and read, one of the greatest, most enduring, most learned of god's creatures." then we dehumanise each and every Indian on Earth and turn them, real and living individuals, into pornographic images meant for no one and nothing other than ourselves at play. If I merely found this sentimenatalisation of people to be personally repulsive I'd perhaps write about it anyway, being a Right wing religious bigot; Unfortuneately, the philobarbarist sentimentalisng of "Others" leads straight to genocide. To dehumanise "races" as too glorious to real we destroy our relationships with them and make them dependent on our phantasitic desires for more our our own feel-good, regardless of the lives they lose, no matter the lives they take.

To conclude, I do not suggest hanging Ottawa Core from a lampost. I reserve that for our murderous Presbyterian Church of the USA among so many others. This, however, should be a conversation, and I welcome your considered opinions in response.