Hints For Heretics

On my recent blogging anniversary - on which I noticed no one sent cards or presents - I was tempted to post a retread of one of the pieces I was proudest of, I Won't Be Fair To Fascists, I Won't Be Nice To Nazis, adding something like I Won't Be Kind To Commies (told you I'd changed during the past 14 years), but I may save that.  Instead I'll write about some of the things I've learned in those changes from my far less original conventional lefty phase which left me far more radical than I had been.  

This blog is called The Thought Criminal as a result of my time as the weekend blogger at Echidne of the Snakes, a fine blog by one of the best inexplicably neglected writers of the short hey-day of blogging.   Echidne certainly knew she was asking someone to weekend for her who had some unconventional views for a lefty, someone who in my first blog posts had announced my intention of being a critic of the left based in the mortal sin of repeated and long-standing political failure.  If our ideas are so friggin' great as compared to the opposition - and many of them are actually great in that comparison - WHY THE FECK ARE WE SUCH A FRIGGIN' FLOP AT THE POLLS?   DECADE AFTER DECADE, GENERATION AFTER GENERATION, NOW IN DANGER OF CONTINUING THAT INTO A CENTURY OF FLOPS.  MORE SO IF YOU ARE CHUMP ENOUGH TO INCLUDE THE MARXISTS AND THEIR ALLIES IN OUR FLOCK.  

I was constantly posting things, starting with my posting of the piece I mentioned above at a blog with a wider readership and I was constantly being told that I was thinking forbidden thoughts and saying forbidden things.  Constantly, long and loud.  I was forbidden to say that it was insane for any entity of the left to stand up for the rights of anyone who opposed equality, who opposed democracy who, if they gained power would deny every and all rights to us and, more importantly, whatever racial, ethnic, gender identity group they made the focus of their genocides and hate campaigns - NO GROUP MORE SO TARGETED THAN THOSE WHO WERE POOR AND POWERLESS.   I announced my first day that I absolutely despised that ACLU style idiocy in the form of the then living self-promoted hero of that most idiotic position ever pushed as phony leftism, the Village Voice-Progressive Magazine* celeb, Nat Hentoff.  

Added to that was, of course, my apostasy in the matter of Charles Darwin and, as I read him and the Darwinists from the beginning up till today, my conviction that natural selection is an intellectual construct based in the ideologies of those who cling to it and the convenience of those within the biological professions (as well as the pseudo-sciences) but which almost certainly does not exist except as a common received delusion.  

The worst responses I got were a post in which I wrote about a niece who died as a result of a severe mental illness and the absolute fact that she would have been alive then and probably far happier if she had been in custodial care.  The viciousness and insanity of the response for the right of those who are so mentally ill so as to be unable to exercise rational agency for themselves in which I was told my niece being dead was a good thing because "she died on her own terms" opened my eyes rather completely as to how depraved the talk of "rights" can be when it is divorced from reality.   I wish the comment threads on that post were still available because it was one of the worst I experienced and was chock full of examples of how cruelly insane a conventionalized point of view on that had become.   

I started this blog on Saturday, June 19th 2010 during one such contentious weekend a decade ago of being told I couldn't say and could't think what I'd said, of being told I was a thought criminal, I realized, even though that phrase wasn't used.  So I went with that.  

The lessons I've learned from the many brawls I've enjoyed and those I haven't, such as the one which told me that it was right that my beloved niece died a terrible and prolonged death, a niece who my family struggled to save - from the mental "health" industry and her alleged "civil rights"**  as much as from her mental illness, have led me to conclude that all of the things I saw were a problem for the political success of the left were not only still there, unreflected on, unexamined, not corrected but were getting worse.  I think the lefty media, the podcasts, the blogs (of ever lessening impact) the online magazines, the relics that still print on paper are by and large the engines of that continued fall into the pit.  Though, considering their pathetic self-imposed impotence, calling it an engine is an inapt metaphor, it's more like a rope line of chumps walking into the pit, one after another, few if any with the foresight to let go of the rope.    

The one piece of advice that I can give my fellow heretics is to have the citations and facts to back up what you say,  NOT THAT IT IS GOING TO GET YOUR OPPONENTS TO ADMIT THEIR ERRORS, they won't do that though it might jar a few minds loose of the stuck lids that ideology places on thought.  You will at least know that you have made your argument and it will inevitably give you clues as to where to look for more confirmation or for contraindications, evidence that you are wrong or not quite there yet.   It is one of the most interesting things I've found in this that the college-credentialed are as immune to the effect of evidence presented as those they love to disdain among the great unwashed (that's "the masses" in traditional lefty jargon).   I've come to see that having a degree is no guarantee that someone is going to be more susceptible to what, to use the current pretentious phrase, "the data," the evidence shows.  

I will repeat the heresy that led to this post, that the higher levels of theological writing are some of the least prone to that academic dishonesty that I've experienced.   Perhaps that's because a lot of theologians believe something that ever so many of my former fellow lefties demonstrably do not (and virtually no conservatives do) that it is a sin to tell a lie and to bear false witness.   I have been absolutely blown away with the gales of self-critical content of fair-minded but rigorous consideration of opposing viewpoints in the best theological writing I've read.  Which, I find, it's forbidden for a lefty to read with an open mind,  no, not even that, it's forbidden to read it at all. 

*  I have to say that I have come to have a disdain for the "leftists" of Madison Wisconsin that includes The Progressive Magazine and such family businesses as The Freedom From Religion Foundation.  I was encouraged by a social worker I ran into during my youth to apply to the University of Wisconsin which he called "The Berkeley of the mid-west".  Am I ever glad I didn't take that advice.  

** The idea that someone who cannot think clearly and who is constantly a danger to themselves as a result have a right to destroy themselves and others is one of the stupidest of the stupid ideas of the "civil rights" industry, as advocated in some of the most irresponsible crap to come out of 3rd rate novelists and the even lower level that Hollywood puts out.  

I remember in that brawl over that post that one of the people who commented said that they were a victim of mental illness and, in their lucid intervals, they  were grateful that people had stepped in and exercised custody over them so that they could live and, in their lucid periods, live a life of relative freedom.  It's one of the few such comments as most of them were made in the total confidence that such advocates of "rights" on behalf of other people can make without ever, once, considering the effects of their loftily proclaimed stands for liberty.   One of the more important things I realized is that "liberty" is generally a word to signal that you should watch, very carefully, what the person proclaiming it was really asking for.  Especially when it's a lawyer or a lefty scribbler who has no intention of having anything to do with the wreckage that their lofty principle results in.   Another thing I've noted is that we've gone from the problems of the 20th century mental hospital as a warehouse of the mentally ill to going back to the 18th century in which inevitably a lot of them end up in county jails and prisons.  That is the ones who don't end up dying on the streets, the victims of crime so much more often than they are the cause of it.  Of the overall crime of neglect.   

I can't claim that I don't despise that kind of "civil rights" advocacy. I absolutely despise the ACLU which takes away five times in "free speech, free press" advocacy what it otherwise gives.  

Update:  I wrote an earlier piece about the failure of the mental "health" industry and "rights" industry before I wrote the one mentioned above.  The link to the Boston Globe still works, which proves the experience of my family with that was not unique.