tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post3443286252535019740..comments2023-10-21T08:02:56.571-07:00Comments on No Dhimmitude: Ben Bella BreivikDaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10664271893389366772noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-44984200309891178402011-08-04T22:03:04.297-07:002011-08-04T22:03:04.297-07:00I'll exhaust my store of sociological knowledg...I'll exhaust my store of sociological knowledge here, (with the exception of passing knowledge of Erving Goffman's sometimes hypnotic freakshow writings) by noting that some "outsiders," as anonymous is, sometimes present themselves for admission to the group by posing themselves as aggressive, this in the hope of unchallenged admission. This self-presentation here, as I see it, is to the realm of what sociologists call the "homosocial," i.e. the world of men. Anonymous is clearly a desperate metrosexual longing for acceptance into a masculine group, for a place among men, and he has no idea how to accomplish this. Thus, he becomes a parody of a masculine male, and comes across, as is likely his whole nature, as organically incapable of mid-range thought and lacking in any male socialisation. Most guys would just punch him in the face and be done with him. He'd then learn his position in the male pecking order. He can't learn that when he is protected from the male world by a corrupt culture that stigmatises masculinity in males. It's obviously driving this kid nuts, and he can't find any relief beyond lashing out and demanding attention. <br /><br />I don't care. Men learn or they don't. I'm not here to baby-sit a loser. <br /><br />On the other note, I think it takes something of great imagination to believe in something more than nothing. I look at the universe and see an endless empty sky, a heart of darkness. Too bad for me. But life is full of surprises. I certainly prefer it to what I've seen of the alternative.Daghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10664271893389366772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-61620471722521025672011-08-04T21:30:36.980-07:002011-08-04T21:30:36.980-07:00Couple of comments, Dag:
I'm a guy with some ...Couple of comments, Dag:<br /><br />I'm a guy with some imagination, but generally pretty prosaic myself.<br /><br />Second, I think out anonymous friend thinks he's being "intense" and epater-ing us bourgeoisie with his strings of insults. I'll use the little imagination I have to guess that you probably said something that popped his bubble. Maybe the temptation to come over to our "dark side" is getting a little strong fore him, so he rages against what you have said.Kephahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00999385775493831638noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-542805205613831392011-08-04T11:22:09.543-07:002011-08-04T11:22:09.543-07:00Anon., I leave your comments up to allow people to...Anon., I leave your comments up to allow people to see how stupid and vile you are as a human being. This was your last proof.Daghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10664271893389366772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-84702223768308258762011-08-03T11:45:57.856-07:002011-08-03T11:45:57.856-07:00It's always hilarious to realize that you cons...It's always hilarious to realize that you consider yourself some sort of intellectual.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-45355263315651575102011-08-02T20:25:19.409-07:002011-08-02T20:25:19.409-07:00I'm a terrible atheist, Kepha, and I can't...I'm a terrible atheist, Kepha, and I can't see any gain in being a terrible Christian. <br /><br />Having made that claim, half jokingly, I do argue in favour of Christianity for, if only one reason, the sake of it bounding the evils one might do without it. If one has not the strength of mind to resist the evil one would do, then one might turn to all things Christian, if not being a better person, at least not being an actively evil one in the world. If one has no "Ludovico Treatment" that we see in Burgess' _A Clockwork Orange_ to make us sick at the thought of crime and violence, then Christianity might be the internal trigger, the Ludovico Treatment of the self to make us at least behave against ourself's desires. <br /><br />I would say yes to Christianity without any deep qualms if I could. I can't. This is not because I am Mister Big Science and I think I know better than the history of men who have thought deeply and come to Christianity. I'm not so smart; I'm an atheist because I have won in this life an unbounded lack of imagination.Daghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10664271893389366772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-38813865922958883172011-08-02T10:43:27.432-07:002011-08-02T10:43:27.432-07:00Dag, forgive my bluntness, but your last post look...Dag, forgive my bluntness, but your last post looks as if you're slowly arguing yourself into Christianity.<br /><br />Good point that none of us are in ourselves better men than Breivik. Such cruelty is doubtlessly there in many other human hearts, only there are numerous ways in which it is restrained.Kephahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00999385775493831638noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-71147576888772781602011-08-01T12:06:26.481-07:002011-08-01T12:06:26.481-07:00Like drug addicts or alcoholics or the wild settli...Like drug addicts or alcoholics or the wild settling at last, they come of their own accord from their own driven need, often like those who return to church. It's far easier to live a normal and reasonable life from the beginning, but the prodigal son is most welcome. For me it's a celebration of the human to see someone take up Socrates rather than a bottle or a cudgel. It happens. It's maturity. Sometimes it happens late in a life. <br /><br />That Breivik murdered children is for me a gnostic vision of man. I've come to this understanding late in life, but I am now deeply impressed by the concept. That man is so far removed from humility that he thinks himself a demi-god capable of seeing the perfect truth and feels justified in slaughtering the masses to make it real in the world is what they do and who they are. They can easily lay them down; but not a one can raise them up those they've laid down. Not a one of them. <br /><br />My concern with death isn't that people are no longer with us and living and experiencing their own lives; the horror for me is that if they die too soon they can never have that epiphany that allows them to redeem themselves, assuming it's necessary for a decent live. When people come back to school to learn to read and think and to wonder, they do so because they want to be better people. It's what they want. They desire the good at last. To cut that off before they have a chance to want it, and not many do, is to rubbish the life of men who might have wanted, and one has no right, none of us being so prescient. <br /><br />Breivik was a gnostic, I think, who felt that his superior wisdom justified his actions. He destroyed the chances of those who might have, as we say, seen the light. He did wrong.<br /><br />In terms of gnostic insight, he was clever, doing the rational and, to me, Satanic, right. He wiped out a segment of a class that will be hard to replace, and he terrorised the survivors into something we can't foresee. It was cunning, but it wasn't smart. <br /><br />I'm not a better man than Breivik. When I hear that Clan Islam has stolen a pot from Clan Modern I reach for my sword and turn into a raging beast ready for massacre. I'm ready and willing to run through the glen hacking like a savage at anyone who looks not my own clan. Temper. We temper that with Reason. It makes us far the harder for it. <br /><br />Too often I am in favour of violence against our enemies; but one must look ahead of ones immediate rage to see what is possible for others, enemies or not. If we kill them all in a fury, yes, they are done; but if we can wait and teach when they come instead as desperate men and women who want to know at last, then we are blessed. <br /><br />For all of that, I am still a terrible Highlander.Daghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10664271893389366772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-83241562675784784272011-08-01T12:06:05.443-07:002011-08-01T12:06:05.443-07:00A large portion of my family is clearly of Norwegi...A large portion of my family is clearly of Norwegian descent, but I don't think I could find one person among the extended group who would think about that or believe it if it were proven by dna tests; rather they are Scottish to the bone and know only the local scene from the mists of time. We're what one might call "close-knit." Whole villages in some areas are so, shall I say, in-bred, that I look like all of them to a frightening degree. There was a Scottish diaspora after the Clearances and well beyond that, forcing my own to scatter around the New World, and all of my life I have found strangers determined that I must be the person they think I am, I simple "am" the person that claim I am because I look like me/the other person they know. Yes, sometimes I see myself too, and he sees me, and it is discomfiting. Further, we share culture we mostly don't understand, folkways that we inherit from parents and near family, that are unchanged from the ways of the Old Country, and things so uncritically assumed that we pass them on without thinking. When I lived in Scotland I hated it: it was just like home. <br /><br />As you point out, though, people do change, and fundamentally in some ways, when they learn and gain experience in the world. Some of my most rewarding experiences in life have been during times teaching adults returning to school to learn the things they couldn't learn as children. I teach, sometimes, Adult Basic Literacy. I find men and women coming to school to find out what they missed and to get into life as others have had all along. They come of their own free will, determined to learn, often after years of failure and loss, and they want to know, at last, desperate sometimes to soak up all the things they've missed. Catastrophic lives come to find order and meaning. I teach literature. I teach from stories about the universal experiences of Man. Science might be fine, and History is good, but I think that fiction is the higher truth.Daghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10664271893389366772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-70421948126359364132011-07-29T18:32:06.125-07:002011-07-29T18:32:06.125-07:00Jason, I think nothing about men has changed since...Jason, I think nothing about men has changed since the times of Knossis, that man is still man, and eternally so. <br /><br />These utopian dreams of the perfect man, or even Homo Sovieticus, a good man, are terrible phantasies that cause death and destruction just the same as any other outburst of unrestrained man at his worst. Capitalism, so-called, is the only saving grace I can see in the world, and it doesn't work that well in Norway, all the good of Modernity begin turned to a political religion as evil as Nazism was 60 years ago. We have to deal with the actual nature of man and put aside the childish things of Norwegian haters and their moralistic evils that allow for a man like Breivik to emerge from them. Man is man. The leftist think not, think themselves demi-gods, think themselves geniuses in control. How foolish. How obviously evil. And they cannot learn the difference. Breivik must be howling in his cell, laughing at the madness he is exposing. There will be more. There is always more.Daghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10664271893389366772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-34887955380884592212011-07-29T18:23:52.996-07:002011-07-29T18:23:52.996-07:00I think the the European left will play right into...I think the the European left will play right into Breivik's hands by suppressing counter-jihadi speech even more than before. While Breivik's illiberal dictatorship would suppress the multi-culturalists; the Labor Party will show themselves to be just as illiberal. It will be the false alternative again. In the 1930 it was fascism or communism, for most Europeans. History is about to repeat itself as farce. Breivik will be laughing in his comfortable cell while watching it on his flat screen. Or could Norway wake-up?<br /><br />Back to Algeria. In the last 20 years over 200,000 have been killed by a civil war between Salafi forces and the military dictatorship. France has long been out of the picture. This is pure Algerian culture. Once again that false alternative. My guess is that Egypt will enter that phase next.Jason Pappashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18233796281520274898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-75114378252608507762011-07-29T15:50:26.752-07:002011-07-29T15:50:26.752-07:00Now, that is a fascinating comment. It adds so muc...Now, that is a fascinating comment. It adds so much and enlivens the debate in ways only one such as you could do. I think, no! I am sure you are a leftist genius who should tell the rest of humanity what to think. Thanks for you deep thoughts.Daghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10664271893389366772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-42568368205148730112011-07-29T15:25:47.068-07:002011-07-29T15:25:47.068-07:00It sure is a sick little bubble you wingnuts live ...It sure is a sick little bubble you wingnuts live in.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-7473664806877417422011-07-29T14:59:24.242-07:002011-07-29T14:59:24.242-07:00Thank you, CGW, for your comment (and link at Jiha...Thank you, CGW, for your comment (and link at Jihad Watch.)<br /><br />Kepha, I don't know what to say about the change in Norway from a poverty-stricken back-water not so long ago to a now fully Modernist and yet nihilist hell-hole of outrageously expensive alcohol and moralistic rage. I know your answer will be that Norwegians have fallen from traditional Christianity to something-- I'll say Satanic. <br /><br />I'm no Christian, and certainly not the scholar you are in this field, but I have some deep sympathy for Christianity in general, especially when contrasted with European neo-pagan Romanticism as a political religion. Better to be a boring and ordinary Christian like Sarah Palin than a gnostic lunatic who believes in his own Will as telos. Humility is a hard lesson to learn, and I think wealth, much of it rentier in Norway, has corrupted a basically peasant population to the point of destruction. The destruction is not near complete, hardly begun, and until Norwegians come to humility, they are doomed to produce Breiviks here and there in mirror image of their own gnosticism. <br /><br />Again, thank you both for your comments.Daghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10664271893389366772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-91245171258437355732011-07-29T14:48:40.769-07:002011-07-29T14:48:40.769-07:00I weep for Norway.
Among countries in occupied Eu...I weep for Norway.<br /><br />Among countries in occupied Europe during WWII, Norway, despite Vidkun Quisling's name being used for collaborators in those days, had a generally good record on resistance to the Final Solution. Roughly Half of Norway's small Jewish community survived the war. The starchy, confessionalist Lutheran bishop Ole Hallesby was imprisoned for saying that Christians should not aid the Germans in killing off the Jews, in which he was joined by numerous other voices in the established church. The Nasjonal Samling did not have enough people to really make a functional government (in clear contrast to France), so the German occupation forces had to do a lot of the administrative work themselves.<br /><br />Hence, I am deeply saddened to hear of major parties in Norway becoming all but neo-Nazi in their hatred of Israel.<br /><br />As for Breivik:<br /><br />Mannen er en kriminell, ren og enkel (the man was a criminal, pure and simple).Kephahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00999385775493831638noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-60738800354432789082011-07-29T12:58:01.264-07:002011-07-29T12:58:01.264-07:00Excellent analysis, Dag.Excellent analysis, Dag.CGWnoreply@blogger.com