Polite Kid

We knew this was coming. But all the same, it doesn't bode well, for obvious reasons.
THE ratings used for films could be applied to websites in a bid to better police the internet and protect children from harmful and offensive material, Britain's minister for culture has said.
Andy Burnham told Britain's The Daily Telegraph newspaper the government was planning to negotiate with the administration of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to draw up new international rules for English language websites.
"The more we seek international solutions to this stuff - the UK and the U.S. working together - the more that an international norm will set an industry norm," the newspaper reports the Culture Secretary as saying.
Giving websites film-style ratings would be one possibilty.
"This is an area that is really now coming into full focus," Mr Burnham said.
Internet service providers could also be forced to offer services where the only sites accessible are those deemed suitable for children, the paper said.
[...]
"If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that governments couldn't reach," Burnham told The Daily Telegraph. "I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now."
He said some content should not be available to be viewed.
"This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it."
[Emphasis mine]
We all know that the interpretations of 'offensive' or 'harmful' or 'hateful' will rest with the liberals and leftists who are now to be in the drivers' seat in Washington, D.C. as of January. And if ''our" government is to work hand-in-hand with the leftist British government, no good can come from that for either country.
Blogs like this one, and many other, far less politically incorrect blogs and forums will be filtered if not removed entirely. It may not happen overnight, but this is the direction in which we are headed.
The politically correct vigilantes will be ever more emboldened to silence anyone who fails to toe the line.
We should be thinking about ways to circumvent this effort to quash free speech. We will have to find alternatives, and I believe where there's a will, there's a way. We will have to find alternative ways to communicate and to speak the truth that needs to be heard.
I'm convinced that one of the first acts of our new overlords will be to pass the 'hate speech' and 'hate crime' laws that they have been itching to push through, but failed to do in the last session. I am convinced that this is a priority for them.
"The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing." - John Adams
"In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Who ever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech." - Benjamin Franklin
"For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished freedom is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while there was still time. - Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland
"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no Constitution, no Law, no Court can save it...Where do you stand Citizen?" - Judge Learned Hand
'"Truth is hate to those who hate the truth" - quote from protester Arlene Elshinnawy, from the WND article linked above

Labels: Bloggers, Blogs, Censorship, Cultural Marxism, Free Press, Free Speech, Freedom Of Expression, Hate Speech, Internet, Liberal Intolerance, Liberals

Dennis Dale at Untethered has a thought-provoking essay titled The Ever-Expanding Expansionist Compact, II, Empire Abroad, Empire at Home.
In it he very effectively ties together the issue of military adventurism of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' and the illegal invasion. Here is just a sample:
This imperial expansion of the American Commons directs inward as well; twelve million or (likely many) more illegal squatters, invited by a willfully negligent government acting in defiance of popular will, now lay claim to certain rights, through the fait accompli of their residency, abetted by the lobbying of their native countries and their alliance with political power groups such as La Raza, through implicit compacts of questionable legality with "haven" cities, industries and even with the Catholic Church, that sees its own salvation through fortifying its ranks with the souls, and liberation theology, cast off from Latin America.
A fatal flaw in democracy is exposed: both political parties, each covetous and fearful of the emerging demographic plurality, can only seek to curry its favor through legislation. In this way legislation is extorted from congress through the mass, illegal migration of a group drawn primarily from one nation--a distinct foreign faction. Calling it an "invasion" is more accurate than even some who use the term know.
This elite-abetted invasion rests on the same notion of individual rights above national sovereignty that brings the disaster of the Iraq war--and just as in that case the moral argument is disingenuous cover for crasser goals. Just as the Iraqi became a quasi-citizen of an expanded American state, so too does the illegal immigrant. Expansion abroad is entirely consistent with expansion inward: our own border is ultimately as meaningless as any other. And just as the same liberal values ostensibly to be brought to the world through military conquest are in fact destroyed by it, they are similarly sacrificed to the inward expansion of the elite's imperium. Democracy will not survive the racial factionalization accelerated and aggravated by the current cycle of passive border enforcement relieved by periodic amnesties.''
It should be read in its entirety. Great piece.

Labels: Bloggers, Democracy, Illegal Immigration, Iraq War

I'm distinctly uninspired this evening, so I've been over at a site called Typealyzer.com which supposedly assesses the personality type of the blogger based on the content of a blog. It's all based on the Myers-Briggs personality typing system, which classifies individuals according to introversion/extraversion, intuitive vs. sensate, thinking vs. feeling, and judging vs. perceiving. I won't try to explain all that; some of you are probably familiar with it, and if not, you can read about it here.
Anyway, Typealyzer says this of my blog:
The analysis indicates that the author of http://vanishingamerican.blogspot.com is of the type:
INTP - The Thinkers
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.
They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.
This is interesting because I've been classed as an INTP based on the MBTI tests I've taken.
The Myers-Briggs typology is supposedly based on the ideas of Carl Jung, and as most of my regular readers probably know, I am not a big fan of psychological theories or of Jung's school of thought, but there seems to be some validity to the MBTI, from my own experience of it.
So, as with anything else, I sift it and discard what is not useful, while taking on board whatever seems valid.
Any other INTPs out there? Have any of you been 'typed', or had your blog typed with Typealyzer?

Labels: Bloggers, Blogs, Personality Types

In case you haven't noticed, 'Mild Colonial Boy' has begun posting again, his blog now being titled The New Anti-Jacobin.
The new name is very promising, and I like the quotes in his sidebar, especially this one:
''I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one�s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us." - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Sounds very much like my own motivations these days.
Anyway it is good to see MCB blogging again.

Labels: Blog Business, Bloggers

In my travels around the internet, I came across a blog, apparently run by a British blogger, who simply collects and posts links to sites and blogs dealing with an eclectic array of subjects.
But this particular blog wears its politics on its sleeve -- which is fine up to a point, but if the purpose of the blog is simply to share links of interest on various subjects, is it not possible to put politics aside and simply offer those links without making a political point? I would hope that I could do so; I have thought of starting another blog strictly for the non-political items, things which are of interest, sometimes trivial or frivolous, sometimes just fun, diverting, or bizarre. But it seems that leftists and liberals see political lessons in anything and everything; they eat, live, breathe, and dream their politics and ideology. This is something I touched on in a blog entry I wrote recently, which I called 'No escaping politics.' I was lamenting the fact that even trivial and seemingly innocuous areas of life, such as popular entertainment, was politicized by liberals and leftists and their constant carping and moralizing. That tendency is evident on the blog I mentioned.
Just to illustrate what I mean, I would guess that about 75% of the links are in some way leftist/liberal, dealing with revisionist history from the point of view of some victim group or other, or otherwise politically correct to the max. For example, a web page for 'deaf queers.' (Their terminology, not mine.) And there are the obligatory links to pages about Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela -- the whole pantheon of the left. Then there are links to sites about Liberian refugees, the Zoot Suit Riots, Afro-Cuba, the history of colonial oppression in the Congo, a site about the Pacific Island state of Tuvalu, which we are told is 'threatened by global warming.'
We find a link to a site about 'Self-harm' and an information clearing-house for self-harmers. I assume that 'self-harmers' are those who are into the morbid fad of cutting themselves and other such things.
There is a site by or for Nigerian artists, and one about the 'survivors of the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921.'
There are links to sites like 'Rabble' which is 'left-talk.' And there is a site called 'Knitters Against George Bush.'
There are many links to 'outsider artists' which seems to mean 'naive' or untrained artists who work in a very primitive or childish style; this is apparently hip, given the left's disassociation of art from beauty and grace.
There are links aplenty to sites having to do with 'sexual minorities' as well as obscure racial and ethnic minorites like Romany Gypsies and Melungeons. There are sites about homelessness, and sites which will give money for starving Argentine children for each click.
Reading through the many, many links at this blog is interesting but it begins to be very depressing after a couple of pages of such topics. I begin to consider what the world looks like to the leftists and liberals, and having been one (although I had some atavistic conservative beliefs which I never lost in those days) I can remember perceiving the world as this big mass of misery, full of victims -- who were righteous and saintly -- and victimizers, who were the successful people, the normal people whose success and normalcy were obviously gained at the expense of the poor victim groups.
The blog in question is an example of how leftists truly live in an 'alternative' universe, where only the bizarre, the outre, the exotic, the rebellious, the odd, and the Other are central to their universe. This alternate universe has its own history, in which the 'wretched of the earth' are front and center.
The leftist worldview focuses always on suffering and victimhood and 'outsider-hood'; there is righteous indignation and anger about all the suffering and injustice and poverty and inequality and low self-esteem. But there seems to be a cherishing of all these bad things; a tendency to prize these things as being somehow exalting in themselves. If you are a member of some oppressed victim group, based on race, ethnicity, sexual habits, criminal history (including immigration status) , or other outsider status, then you are automatically put on a pedestal of sorts; it's apparently an inversion of society's values, wherein we traditionally honored people who excelled or distinguished themselves, or people of character and ability.
Far from wanting to defeat poverty, injustice, war, oppression, or suffering, the left clings to those things, and cherishes them. It gives meaning and purpose to their lives. It enables them to have a self-righteous cause and an excuse to rail endlessly against the system, to strike a pose as the rebel, the seer, and the would-be avenger.
Now, we live in an age in which there is plenty wrong with the system, and the powers that be are seemingly detached from the people they claim to represent and serve, but all the same, the left is over the top in their opposition to the established order. It's all too evident that they would prefer to bring down the existing order of things, and destroy traditional society and its 'oppressive' rules and morality.
We all know from the evidence of history that leftism has never solved the problems it purports to have the answers to. Instead, leftist regimes, whether of the mild 'socialist' variety or of the harsher sort, exacerbate the problems they claim to fix. Injustice and inequality have never disappeared under a leftist system, and though they usually make claims to be for 'peace' they often result in bloodshed on a vast scale, as with Stalin and Pol Pot.
No, the left, despite their constant obsessing on the sufferings and injustices of this present world, does not want to solve these intractable problems; they identify with them too much. The things which enrage the left, the things they rail against so much, are part and parcel of the human condition since Adam and Eve were evicted from Eden.
Leftists are always in rebellion against authority, and they seem perpetually infuriated at the fact that we human beings have to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow. I think they would prefer to be able to return to the idyllic pre-Fall world, in which man and woman had things easy. But Adam and Eve lost that privilege when they rebelled against God's authority. The left is still rebelling against God's authority, still raging over the loss of Eden, and refusing to recognize that we human beings brought our troubles on ourselves.
In the meantime, since we are stuck with this imperfect world, it would seem that we should be able to enjoy what good and pleasant things there are -- and there are many -- without having to turn everything into an occasion for sob stories, condemnations, and bitterness. Not everything in the world need be turned into a political morality play.

Labels: Bloggers, Blogosphere, Leftism, Liberalism, Politics

This post is not one that I had planned for today, but it's an impromptu post, based on comments I just read on another site, comments which echo almost identical remarks I've read countless times on other, similar sites and forums. In fact, more than once, I've had such remarks aimed at me on this blog.
Have you all guessed what I am about to write? The comments in question were along the lines of 'you talk about what is wrong but what are we supposed to do? Why aren't you out doing something? Why does everybody just complain, and do nothing? What about organizing?'
I've addressed such complaints -- or accusations framed as questions, before. But since this is such a common question, I'll try again.
To begin with: there are websites, forums, and blogs that DO promote some kind of action, usually along the lines of organizing faxing/e-mail/phone/letter-writing campaigns. Some have promoted boycotts. Some publicize and take part in protests and rallies, sometimes counter-rallies where the pro-amnesty mob is protesting. This is possible mostly where the people involved in the web forums are able to network in the real world with like-minded people and actually physically get together and do things as a group. Many of the people on certain anti-illegal forums, for example, are located in Southern California or Arizona, and hence can act as a group in their local areas.
Some bloggers are encouraging web-based activism, like e-mailing. But what other options are there, given that we are all scattered here and there?
This blog, like many similar ones, however, is frequented by people who are mostly widely dispersed throughout this vast continent. By means of my site statistics, I know that my regular readers are located not only in the U.S. and Canada, but in Europe, Australia, and even a few in Asia and elsewhere. This situation does not lend itself to organizing any kind of group effort.
I don't usually exhort my readers to fax, write, e-mail, or call anybody; I've done that on the odd occasion, like when the amnesty bill in, one of its lives, was threatening to succeed. But in general I tend to trust that my readers are savvy enough to do those things, and informed enough to know how to go about it: how to contact their representatives and make their wishes known.
But I support those who organize such campaigns. I don't disparage them, and I try to do what I can when I can.
I think many of us are prone to forget local action; this may be the area in which to concentrate, as opposed to Washington D.C., which seems to become more remote and unresponsive, if not downright hostile, with each day. I think we should be as involved as we can in local affairs in our towns/cities and counties, and let's remember school boards too, although I think homeschooling is the best choice these days.
And when I read these frequent complaints on various blogs and forums, I often feel inclined to question whether the complaining person is himself doing all he could in the real world, or whether he is looking to others to not only raise the alarm but to fight the fire too. Are we looking for leaders rather than taking our own initiative? When did we become such a nation of bystanders? In many cases we have to become the leaders we are looking for. If we wait around for the man on a white charger, it may be too late.
It's also good to remember that just because some of us are on the Internet, blogging or posting comments, that does not mean that we are not also doing what we can do in real life. It's a fallacy that the person who is a ''keyboard warrior',' as some disparagingly put it, is a shirker out there in the everyday real world. All of us, surely, have lives outside the Internet where we take these issues just as seriously as we do in cyberspace.
None of us knows what the rest are doing or not doing out there in the real world; it's not a case of either/or; being an 'internet activist' hardly precludes doing something in real life -- unless one spends all of one's waking hours at the computer.
Ideas and action are not mutually exclusive, although often the 'men of action' and the thinkers and exhorters and philosophers are two different groups of people. Everybody has a part to play, and as with any other effort, there has to be some specialization of function. We can't all be carrying out the same roles.
It would seem that the sphere of action is out there in the world around us, in our immediate surroundings. The Internet, in many cases, is just a place to discuss, philosophize, strategize, gather moral support, spread the word, but out there in the towns and communities we each inhabit, that's where we have to focus our real-life efforts.
At the same time, if anybody out there has suggestions for practical ways we can act, or if anybody has successes they can relate to inspire the rest of us, or give us hints as to what we might do, or how best to do it, I'm interested in any such stories.
This is a frustrating, disheartening effort, when it seems that the odds against us are long, and many people are outright hostile to us, but let's not blame each other for the obstacles we encounter. We need to have some kind of spiritual unity to give us the strength to keep going.

Labels: Activists, Bloggers, Blogosphere, Politics