Fyrd Punishment.

It's painfully simple to complicate the concept, the good and the right limits of "punishment," to the point of sophistry. But let's not. Let's try to keep it as simple as a stick or a stone. Let us, metaphorically at least, utopian as it will seem, say, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Let's not talk strictly about the Law. Let's talk instead about the Fyrd, and let's talk among ourselves about Punishment.

Love that scene in Pulp Fiction, "I'm gonna get Medieval on your ass."

I've seen it in real life, so to say, and it drives me to jurisprudence. Sometimes. But sometimes the book just hasn't yet been written yet that covers things we really need to know now. For those times, many in this imperfect world, we need some authority wiser and more just than learned and reasoned tomes. Sometimes we need a blow-torch and a pair of pliers. We can call it punishment.

Recently a man shot himself to death in England. The man had been accused of "racism." In our day, an accusation of "racism" might well be enough to cause a normal and social man to kill himself over it. It happened to Roy Amor. Someone accused Amor of "racism." The man is dead now. But the accuser? Is he a moral paragon? Is he righteous?

We live in states of "Anarcho-Tyranny." The common man is illegal in his social being, and the criminal is lauded for his victimhood. We can no longer ask Roy Amor. Soon we might not be allowed to ask Geert Wilders or Ezra Levant or Ann Coulter or, maybe, me. Nor will we be allowed to ask our silent accusers, they who will remain masked and hidden from public view. Today we can know Lorna Pardy. Tomorrow we might only know that someone in has called us to The Trial and has questions we cannot answer. A crime? Maybe this:

"Woman, 86, hassled for eating cookie in wrong place"

A British pensioner who bit a chocolate chip cookie in a store café found herself being threatened with ejection for eating in the wrong place.

On a day out with her family, Thelma Williams sat down for a meal in the Marks & Spencer restaurant with her daughter and grandsons.

The 86-year-old widow from Blackburn, northwestern England, enjoyed a toasted sandwich, but wanted a bit more to eat.

She reached into her bag for the cookie she had bought for 60¢ in the store's food section.

That's when a woman staffer moved in, telling her she could not eat it in the café.

The employee claimed it was because of the difference in tax paid on items bought in the café and the store.

She called the security guard, who was equally insistent on following the rules, even though Ms. Williams tried to reason with him.

"I thought it was petty and ridiculous. I realize they have rules to stick to but it was so silly, I felt stupid. They made me feel like I had committed a crime," she told The Lancashire Telegraph.

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2875572#ixzz0l5gkiQ00

There is no law against this kind of stupidity practised by dullards. There is no law to appeal to even when dullards drive a man to suicide. Instead, there is Velvet Fascism. I argue that this is not a complicated story. It's not a deep philosophical problem. It is a matter of stupidity at all intellectual levels and levels of society generally that men and women have a grasp of the rules and no sense of the game. That sense is lost in a welter of moralisms and officiousness and sentimentality and profound idiocy rewarded by our cultures. I argue it needs quick and brutal punishment. I mean blood should flow in the streets, men should be beaten, buildings set ablaze, harm done. I mean real and hard punishment.

There is a public and cultural madness overtaken the people of Modernity that moralism is moral. There is a moralistic fad in the air that demands of ordinary people that they terrorize the people around them for the sake of showing the terrorists' moralism in public. It is a theatric performance of the nihilist idiot gone mad-- thanks to our culture gone mad in pursuit of perfect utopia. Blood must flow in the streets to waken the masses from this madness.

In our time, stupidity poses as genius, and few are courageous enough to call it out; fewer still to beat it silly till it bleeds. Instead, we see fools, high and low, tormenting the masses for the sake of show. Men die, women are ruined, life is destroyed. Tyranny rules raging in our democracies. Some large lot need to be punished.

Because people for a large part have lost a sense of public propriety in this age of hippiedom, rules follow, requiring a rule of arbitrary lawlessness built up on whimsy and feeling and intention. Driving a man to suicide is not the intention of the "anti-racist" who drove a man to suicide. The intention was to be seen as self-righteous and smug and "moral." There are no rules but feeling right, of intention.

Intention.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions" is thought to have originated with Saint Bernard of Clairvaux who wrote, "L'enfer est plein de bonnes volontés et désires" (hell is full of good wishes and desires). Wikipedia.

The Velvet Fascist demands that all obey the rules of good intention. Law gives way to legalisms. Feelings take priority over Reason. A look, a word, it is the sin. The life of man has no proper place in the life of man today. No, we must look only to the intention and its purity. If the intention is pure, then there is no wrong. The theatre of denunciation is the purity of the moralistic, and it is our law.

It is a commonplace among moralists that the intention is the chief among the determinants of the concrete morality of a human act. Hence when one's motive is grievously bad, or even only slightly so, if it be the exclusive reason for doing something, then an act which is otherwise good is vitiated and reputed to be evil. An end which is only venially bad, and which at the same time does not contain the complete cause for acting, leaves the operation which in other respects was unassailable to be qualified as partly good and partly bad. A good intention can never hallow an action the content of which is wrong. Thus it never can be lawful to steal, even though one's intention be to aid the poor with the proceeds of the theft. The end does not justify the means. It may be noted here in passing, as somewhat cognate to the matter under discussion, that the explicit and frequently renewed reference of one's actions to Almighty God is not now commonly thought to be necessary in order that they may be said to be morally good. The old-time controversy on this point has practically died out.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08069b.htm

Uh Oh.

That tells me it's punishment time. This tells me it's time to get Medieval on the asses of asses.

The current fad of mindless and moralistic pettifoggery is crying out for rampant resort to punishment. I mean blood in the streets. No, of course the fools who think themselves moral geniuses have no intention of causing needless harm when they drive men to suicide, when they destroy lives in smallish ways by sanctimony. So what? Need we care about the intentions of the wicked stupid? I say, "Blood in the streets." Beat them senseless.

Raise the Fyrd, the men of the commons who come to the aid of our people in times of need. Be men of Fyrd, and mete out punishment to those who know no sense, morality, or law. Beat the fools, no matter their fine intentions, and punish them hard.

Free speech and fine speech

Victor Davis Hanson, "Post-election Thoughts," Works and Days. 22 January 2010.

"PC (which serves a variety of purposes from stifling free expression to claiming some mythical higher moral ground through gratuitous censure) ends only when we collectively shrug, and sigh, “Linguistic extortion has zero influence on me.”

http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/post-election-thoughts/2/

The Double Edge of the Velvet Fascist Sword

The author of the following excerpt is afraid to have his name associated with his article at American Thinker. The author fears this association, if known, would harm his career. One must accept that he's very likely correct.

[L]et's do a review of liberal social engineering programs from inception to execution....

• A group of individuals anoints themselves as better-informed than the rest of us. They base this largely on the fact that they listen to the same programs on NPR and consistently vote Democrat.
• The self-defined elite group comes to an agreement that the rest of us are not as enlightened as they. This is expressed in many ways, usually involving code words such as "clinging", "mean-spirited", or "greedy". If you hear these words being applied to you or your associates, this is a clear indication that you are not one of the elites.
• The elites begin to develop a sense of responsibility for their lessers. This is often expressed in statements like, "It's just makes me so sad to see them like that. I wish there were something we could do to..."
• The elites form a plan. The plan generally involves making everyone else behave like them. As enthusiasm rises, what were once "differences" become "problems" and finally metamorphose into a "crisis". When the word "crisis" appears, this usually signals the end of planning phase. The Plan predictably contains the following elements: coercion, moral superiority, lack of debate and voting, and a succession of "experts" who testify on its behalf.
• The plan is imposed. If the legislative branch refuses, the judiciary is prevailed upon to conjure up a constitutional justification.
• The plan begins to fail. This step is usually followed by demands for more resources to "properly implement the plan", (see the War on Poverty), and angry accusations at non-elite groups for their mean spirited, clingy refusal to change.
• The plan fails.
• The elites meet to form a new, better plan.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/05/wellness_ueber_alles.html

The author could be writing about any of any number of things, any of them things we might be against, smoking or junk food or driving without seat-belts or riding bikes without helmets or jogging or watching television, or, .... There's a case, and perhaps a strong case, to be made that other people's bad behaviour affects the pubic and should be stopped. Those who watch television, for example, harm us all by their lethargy and the drag that puts on our community-spiritedness. Maybe they should be forced into gymnastic programmes. Maybe, if they are recalcitrant, they should be put in camps, and if incorrigible, they should be killed. It comes down to what we think of others. Are they free and independent agents or are they farm animals? And if we stop short of executing those who trespass against the neo-norm, perhaps we won't kill them but simply make their lives conform by twisting the culture to the point there is no room for anything but orthopraxy, for right behavioir regardless of the will of the destructive. It becomes a moral imperative to save not just those who would destroy themselves but all of us and even the Earth itself. If we have that imperative, then we would be evil not to act on it, not to mention imprudent.

If pollution adds to the catastrophe of global warming, and if the polluter won't stop of his own volition, then, to save the world and ourselves, we must make him stop. The polluter's private behavior is not a private issue when it "impacts" on the public in serious and even catastrophic ways. If the state will not intervene to prevent harm to the publicity, then it must be for the private interest to intervene for the sake of our very lives, the state having turned against us in pursuit of furthering its payments to its masters, our enemies, our destroyers, those who would and will and do kill us all and the Earth itself. It is imperative and prudent that we halt the harm, the destruction of the self-interested who cause us this general harm, even if the majority do not see it. Having knowledge others lack gives one a further moral obligation to act on behalf of those who do not know or know and do not care to act, who do not dare to act.

How can we verify our truth claims? We might, for a start, rely on our expertise. We might further rely on past practice of those who deny the verity of our awareness, those proven to have acted against the best interests of the majority in the past by toeing the corporate line, for example, in the face of known harm to the publicity. Look, for example, to politicians awarding oil companies generous and extra-legal benefit at the expense of the public. We can know empirically that the majority of people in a democracy do not understand the particular details of the issues of anything, it being beyond the means of anyone to know all things; and thus, one must rely on the expertise of those who specialize. As well as the uninformed opinion of the masses, one must accept both their self-interested opposition to the good in many case, e.g. those who would promote further global warming due to employment in global warming industries; and there is the problem of systemic false consciousness, that which leads the masses into stupidities of harm, against their own interests on behalf of those who harm them. Look, for example, at the Americans who wage war against the Muslim world, doing so for the benefit only of the oil companies and the illegitimate neo-Nazi state of Israel. Can a moral person allow this to continue? Such far exceeds the harm of one man watching television. Such requires immediate action on the part of the one who understands the true nature of the regime and the state of Humanness that create this condition. Then, action on the part of the expert is morally imperative. To know and not to act is to be complicit and immoral and harmful to oneself, to the publicity, and to the Earth itself. Such a crime, given the gravity of it, should be punished; and one cannot allow oneself to knowingly do harm and to deserve punishment if one is-- at least-- prudent. Thus, democracy is a sham at best, a world-destroying harm in effect, when the issue is so dear.

If one has knowledge of impending catastrophe that others do not have or that others have and refuse to act on, it becomes a moral imperative to act alone to save oneself, a first priority, and to save Humanity as well. Not to act is self-destructive, and worse, it is evil. Democracy, yes, but not to the point it allows for or creates conditions of harm to the minority. Then democracy is tyranny of the majority. Democracy under that condition is illegitimate. It is unlawful and need not be obeyed; it must, in fact, be opposed by all right-thinking agents. If a corporation continues to pollute and to destroy the ozone layer over Antarctica, then said corporation must be stopped-- if the world, Mother Earth, is to survive. Things perhaps harmful to the individual must be done for the sake of the greater good. There is nothing radical in this. We understand the necessity of sacrifice for the greater good. Nor is this idealistic: it is prudent to sacrifice oneself for the greater good so that one has a chance to live through the furthering of Human existence, not a thing limited to the individual, whose existence is meaningless without the context of Humanity. If one can see from ones intellectual vantage point the coming of the train, one might well use force to move the cattle off the tracks. And if one is harmed in the process, all to the good that the community might continue to survive with the herd intact. Not to act, to put oneself at the centre of ones existence without regard for the community, is ipso facto to cause the death of the community, becoming a murderer oneself. With awareness comes responsibility.

Some things are evil a priori; therefore no argument is needed to support the idea. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and Islamophobia are evil a priori. Those who act in accord with any or all of the above evils are either/and evil or incoherent. They need not be refuted by any who understand the language and its meaning. Still, they exist and they act in ways evil. Since they cannot be reasoned with, empirically known by their incomprehension of the a priori, they must be dealt with by coercion, or force if need be. Islamophobes, for example, present the world with a dire and urgent crisis by their behaviour: They incite retaliation from 1.9 billion Muslims who turn in their desperation to using their own bodies as weapons against the Islamophobic oppression of Modernity. Any Islamophobe who creates this kind of violent and warranted blow-back on the part of the oppressed should, in fact, must be stopped. Those who understand this must act to prevent Islamophobia if we as a species are to survive. One might object that such is some Gnostic pronouncement, but those of us who understand the language understand it is a priori truth that Islamophobia is evil. Only a deluded or evil person cannot see this. If so, then he must be stopped from continuing by any means necessary. It is prudent, it is a moral imperative, and if it requires self-sacrifice, then it is to the good of all universally, a universality without which we have no identity anyway. There is nothing Gnostic in grasping the obvious. The author above disparages the "elite" but in effect is writing from a position of privilege: notice the "career" he feels he must protect. He.like so many others, knows the truth and has consciously decided to do nothing in order that he can live his privacies in some comfort even at the expense of future generations, mocking those who care about the Earth and its people. Those who know must act. That knowledge is obvious to any right-thinking person who has gone beyond the norms of the hegemony of capitalism. Those who haven't, those who have and refuse to acknowledge their complicity, must be stopped. The depth of the catastrophe and the urgency and the sheer scale of the catastrophe demands private action. It is thus that I am continually asking, "What is to be Done?" We who know know that something is wrong; we know actually what is wrong; and dare I say it; we know what must be done.

Yes, one might still argue that this is a case of Gnostic hubris and an apocalyptic eschatology. Can we wait to find out that we might have been wrong? Do we dare do nothing in the face of this catastrophe? And again, if not, What is to be Done?

Sort of like Velvet Fascism

Here's a book I'm looking forward to reading, it being right along the lines of the main thrusts of this blog:

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (Hardcover)
by Jonah Goldberg.

Amazon books leads off with this:

Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term "National socialism"). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

Do these striking parallels mean that today's liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.

Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a "friendlier," more liberal form. The modern heirs of this "friendly fascist" tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.
http://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0385511841

Then we find a whole lot of reviews: ( 80 customer reviews) . The book gets 37 five star ratings and 24 one star ratings out of 80.

This, By David McCune "self-deprecating and proud of it" , sums it up pretty well: It was inevitable that the review section for Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" would degenerate into the Mother of all Flame Wars. The advance dislike for this book simmered for months, and now the floodgates for negative reviews are open. I'd advise all potential readers of this book to bear in mind how few of the negative reviews appear to reflect a reading of the book.

Or maybe one would feel more attuned to Frank:

By	Frank Tanner

This book is poorly written, idiotic, and will only convince the most extreme right-wing person who already has a persecution complex. It's as crazy and irresponsible as all the talk about the liberal media at a moment when cartoonish right-wingers like Bill O'Reilly and Pat Buchanan can get lucrative gigs as pundits despite spewing hateful views and misinformation. What really makes me mad is that when I was searching for an exercise video that the amazon search engine could not find, they asked me if I wanted to buy this book or the new Tom Cruise bio instead. Why is Amazon promoting this extreme right-wing book in this way and why would they think anyone with a brain would want to buy it? I read it afterwards and was stunned by what a horrible writer, weak thinker, and sad propagandist this author is.
****

So long as the likes of Warren Kinsella and Sid Ryan don't prevent me I look forward to reading this book. The one is a self-confessed censor, the latter a Muslim terrorist panderer. With people like them leading our intelligentsia I just might have lots of time in jail to catch up on my reading. Maybe I'll see you there. No doubt we'll receive counseling between veggie burger meals and Vanessa Redgrave hate-videos. Oh Canada.