Monday, August 14, 2017

We, as individuals, have a right to defend egalitarian democracy against all of its enemies, foreign and domestic, we as people possessing rights, have a moral obligation to defend it for all of us as equals.

If people on the left are going to successfully fight against and prevail against American Nazism, already far past the burgeoning stage with representatives in the White House and Republican Party, they have to admit to what it is and fight it at the root. What it is is a revamped version of the old Nazism, using the same ideas of biological inferiority and superiority - they being the superior - of the beneficial results of a race war in which they murdered all of those they identify as inferior which would result in an even more superior species of survivors.  It is Nazism updated and repackaged to appeal to Americans trained by TV and movies and pop-culture and video games and internet porn. The nostalgia of Nazi propaganda movies (which, by the way, abound in Nazi channels on YouTube and, as mentioned, on podcasts like SoundCloud) is a taste they acquire later.

That idea, as biological science, was originated in Darwin's theory of natural selection just as certainly as natural selection was the origin of Francis Galton and Wilhelm Schallmeyers two strains of eugenics, something which is undeniable because the proponent of those allied forms of scientific racism cited Darwin as their ultimate authority AND HE ENDORSED THE IDEAS THAT BOTH SCIENTIFIC RACISTS AND THE EARLY EUGENICISTS DERIVED FROM HIS THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION.   The verification of the specifically Nazi eugenics as being part of that same line of inheritance comes from none other than Charles Darwin's son, Leonard Darwin, just before WWII began.   The ties of Darwinism to Nazism couldn't possibly be clearer, they're just unread and unadmitted to by the deification of Darwin especially in the post-war period when they invented today's sanitized, sanctified plaster Darwin. 

Today's American Nazis, not having the nationalistic motives of the Germans are explicit in their citations of  Darwin and attributions to him.  I gave links to two posts I did pointing out the foremost influence on American Nazism today,  William L. Pierce, the author of the Turner Diaries, in which he was explicit in basing his pathologically violent racism and anti-Semitism on Charles Darwin and on the authors who Charles Darwin cited in his scientific works, giving them his seal of guaranteed scientific reliability.  He also cites later Darwinists such as the predecessor of the infamous Kevin Macdonald in scientific Jew baiting and racism,  Arthur Keith.  If you did your know-your-enemy homework and read today's American Nazi scribblers and listened to their babblers, you would know that they pretty much take up Pierce's lines, many of them directly taken from German Nazis from the period before they were defeated.   Most of them not being especially bright or original thinkers, much of their scribblage is a rehash of junk Pierce cranked out in his books and magazines.   

In a comment yesterday I noted that the MO of Darwin's defenders on the left is essentially the same as David Irving's in Hitler hagiography and Holocaust denial, of claiming that since there is no order signed by Hitler that says "Kill all the Jews" that means that Hitler was innocent of the Holocaust which, denying the massive evidence and eye-witness testimony and the written records of the Nazis, themselves, Irving minimizes and dismisses.   

All of the things I said yesterday are documentable on the American Nazis websites, in their podcasts.   Their central thesis of racial inferiority and superiority, of the dangers of dysgenesis and other catastrophes, biological and social, of the presence of other races and ethnicities to the "superior" and to the future, the benefits of genocide and the superiority of the survivors of that genocide are all explicitly found in Darwin's own writing and those of the people like Ernst Haeckel, Francis Galton, W. R. Gregg and others in The Descent of Man and to Herbert Spencer in the last two editions he produce of The Origin of Species.   That there were other racists and other strains of scientific racism for Darwin's champions to throw up as distraction does nothing to make the American Nazi's citations of Darwin disappear.  And the great champions of Darwin have given citations of him, by anyone on any side, an entirely out-sized importance.   I doubt that anyone would have noticed William L. Pierce citing the minor, later day Darwinist Arthur Keith because, unlike the work of Darwin, his name would be known only to a few people who had read his ever less read books.  

If the American Nazis are going to be defeated, you're going to have to do it on the basis of what they are claiming as well as meeting them with massive opposition, physical as well as verbal.  Pretending that natural selection, Darwinism, isn't at the very root of their claims is certainly not going to do it. 

I have said, for years, that more than just that will be necessary, suppressing their means of attracting converts from the gaming and porn and whiny "men's rights" internet is another.   I've been saying all of those things for a long, long time, now.   I have pointed out how the mid-20th century "free speech absolutist" interpretation of the First Amendment has enabled the worst of the worst - and the Nazis are among the worst of the worst -  to propagate and to corrupt everything, first minds, then the culture.  I have said that a country which enables lies by granting them and the liars who lie a "right" to lie was a self-made guarantee to disaster.   I have said that egalitarian democracy - THE ONLY REAL AND LEGITIMATE MEANING OF THE WORD IN THE MODERN WORLD - not only must defend itself against anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic ideologies and claims, yes, even those made as science, in order to exist and continue, we, The People, have a right to defend egalitarian democracy which provides the blessings of equality.   We, as individuals, have a right to defend egalitarian democracy against all of its enemies, foreign and domestic, we, as people possessing rights,  have a moral obligation to defend it for all of us as equals.  

And the modern age, with mass communications and modern propaganda methods, the old assumptions of the mid-20th century absolutism which brought us here, with actual Nazis in the White House, with a white supremacist as Attorney General, with an insane, infantile "president" who chose those putting people on the Supreme Court, has proven, beyond doubt, that permitting lies to be spouted through the mass media and on the internet is a guarantee to produce those results.  If you want other examples, Putin, the ultra-billionaire patron of neo-Nazism and fascism in Europe and here,  used mass media to destroy the Russian attempts to establish democracy there.  

Pretty much all of those cherished slogans and bromides of mid-20th century, pseudo-liberalism, what was really just libertarianism with a lefty false front,  have been shown to be empty and wrong.   We don't have any choice but to take a chance on requiring the truth.   As I said,  the price of free speech should be that you use it to tell the truth, the cost of allowing lies is catastrophically high, very likely ultimately so. 

19 comments:

  1. Gov McAuliffe was on NPR this morning denouncing the court order that allowed the march to happen where it did, rather than where the city wanted it to happen. I haven't read the legal opinion, so I don't know what facts were presented, what law was relied on. But the city's argument was public safety: Emancipation Park, where the statue to be removed stands, is small and downtown. The city wanted to rally held at a much larger park where crowd control wouldn't mean covering the city streets.

    McAuliffe pointed out the vehicular manslaughter was possible because huge crowds filled the streets, where they could have filled the alternate site the city wanted to us. Public safety does not trump 1st amendment rights, but the latter do bend to the former. I think if there is a repeat performance in Charlottesville, or anywhere else, it will be easier (sadly) to make the public safety argument prevail over ACLU arguments.

    I like to think so, anyway.

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    1. I would wish that only one such example would be necessary for that.

      I used to be a card-carrying supporter of the ACLU but no more after Skokie. I think they and lawyers like Joel Gora have had a disastrous effect on American democracy, even as they've payed both sides. The image of the boy with one finger plugging one hole in the dike even as he drills more with the other hand should stand as the logo for the ACLU, today.

      I suspect that stuff started in the early decades of the thing as Marxists wanted to use the First Amendment to advocate for a different form of anti-democratic ideology, stupidly, they figured what one of my trolls claims that if we don't let the Nazis lie their way into power they might keep lefties off of chat shows or something. As if people weren't intelligent enough to make a distinction between advocating egalitarian democracy and Nazism. But, maybe that comes from believing people are lumbering robots operating at the whim of genes, really, something that Nazism takes as its basis, as well.

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  2. The issue with something like "the truth" is that it's far too nebulous a term. Not to say I agree with Nazi's and their warped take on Darwinism and Nationalism, but they're an easy target. Much like the pro-capital punishment advocates who always pick the most appalling crimes and hold them up as paradigms.

    The question is, who determines what "the truth" is? I've seen liberals today go from insisting the law will only be a weapon of defense suddenly do a 180 and go on the offensive with it. And then insist that the people they're using it against have it coming. As a librarian, that makes me very uncomfortable.

    So pardon my skepticism, but I would argue the devil is in the details. And you're not giving us many of those.

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    1. "The question is, who determines what "the truth" is?"

      We do. We do it all the time. Courts, judges do it all the time, THAT'S WHAT THEIR FRIGGIN' JOB IS! Why on only certain questions is that question asked as if it were impossible to discern what the truth is? As I mentioned somewhere, perhaps even in this post, I pointed out that judges make the most exacting decisions of truth on entirely less obvious issues, some of them extremely technical, on issues entirely outside of their knowledge base, requiring them to sift through enormous masses of expert testimony, often on very complex scientific or techical issues, and they do it as a matter of course without twisting themselves in all kinds of knots.

      There is no question that Nazis oppose equality and democracy, that they have a long and proven record of violence, discrimination, murder.... don't forget murder. That is not open for any kind of honest or rational debate. It's just when it might make the shade of Nat Hentoff sad that we even entertain that level of phony suspension of reality on issues such as this one.

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  3. You are arguing "the price of free speech is you use it to tell the truth," I would not disagree that it is a person's responsibility to do so. But there are problems that can and will arise from such a perspective.

    Let's consider this example: How many people have used and repeated the claim that "1 in 5 women" are raped during their time in college? I've read it from numerous sources. Here's the thing, even the group that released the survey admitted "there are caveats that make it inappropriate to use the 1-in-5 number in the way it’s being used today."

    OK, so let's say someone they repeated it without properly vetting it or paying attention to the details, are they lying? Likely not deliberately, but are they accidentally? Does that make it better? Then you have to prove intent, and that's damned hard to do. And that raises even further question. Like what is worse? Hell, as Dr. Johnson reminds us, is paved with good intentions.

    With people like Lena Dunham being lionized by the left for her Big Brother inspired eavesdropping and then declaring, "I live for my own truth," you're going to have to remind as many people on that side of the aisle that the "truth" isn't theirs but everyone's.

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    1. The example you use, your contention that it is a lie to say that 20% of women are raped during their time in college is, a. not an attack on equality or democracy, b. not an attack on anyone except criminals, c. possibly accurate. It would not fall within the kind of lying I'm talking about. To claim that a disagreement about that means that Nazis should be able to propagate their attack on entire minority groups, in American Nazism Women being one of the groups under attack as can be seen in what was said about Heather Heyer by the Nazis after one of their own murdered her.

      Your example isn't what I was talking about. Though it is a fact that, daily, in the United States, at least several Women are murdered because they are Women, that is according to the FBI, hardly a radical group.

      I don't think "the left" universally lionizes Lena Dunham, I think her act has its disturbing aspects, based mostly on saying outrageous things to get attention.

      It is especially odd that you bring her up because your criticism that the truth isn't a matter of personal interpretation is exactly the one that the "free speech" industry pose is based in. When it is taken up by judges and "justices" as an excuse for allowing the most malignant of lies - largely told in the media on behalf of the corporate right, those who use racism and bigotry and paranoia and an injured sense of white, straight, affluent male entitlement - the experience of the past fifty-three years shows that it will end up damaging and destroying egalitarian democracy. It will power the kind of Nazism on display last weekend.

      As I said, the whole "free speech absolutist" act is based in transparent lies. A judge can tell the difference between a lie and the truth, their profession is based in that as is the profession of the law. If people were unable to tell the difference between a lie and the truth then the entire basis of the legal profession, everything from the prosecution and defense in murder to the most banal to the most complex aspects of business contracts would be impossible. The whole "free speech" act of lawyers like Joel Gora, the ACLU and the judges and "justices" who go along with it is one big massive lie, itself. Pretending that "we must permit Nazis to propagandize and propagate, yea unto getting into the White House" or else disaster will come is one of the stupidest pieces of doublespeak there is BECAUSE NAZIS WOULD NOT ONLY ABOLISH ALL FREE SPEECH EXCEPT WHAT THEY APPROVED, THEY'D KILL PEOPLE IN THE MILLIONS FOR BEING BLACK, LATINO, LGBT, WOMEN, JEWS, MUSLIMS, OBSERVANT CHRISTIANS,....

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  4. “The example you use, your contention that it is a lie to say that 20% of women are raped during their time in college is, a. not an attack on equality or democracy,”

    I disagree. Crime statistics are imperative as a means of combating unlawful activity and empowering law enforcement and the court system. This should be based on evidence and process, not catering to the trends in perception. How many poor and minority individuals are unfairly targeted and harassed by law enforcement based on erroneous axioms?

    "b. not an attack on anyone except criminals,"

    See above. How many innocent people were unjustly persecuted because of the repressed memory syndrome and satanic panic back in the 80s and 90s?
    As someone who grew up around law enforcement, I can promise you they are “encouraged” by their superiors on where to focus their policing, and if you don’t think public opinion plays a role you don’t know much about politicians.

    "c. possibly accurate."

    No. It’s not. Statisticians have done the math and it creates an absurd number of incidents far beyond what the reported cases would predict. It’s not the first time such a sensationalistic stat was used in the press, either. It was once claimed the number of children murdered by guns “doubled every year!” Do the math for a decade and you’ll see how silly that is.

    And, again, the authors themselves insist the way it was bandied about as click bait is not an appropriate way to use it.

    “It would not fall within the kind of lying I'm talking about.“

    But once you argue that “lying” shouldn’t be protected in a legal sense, you’re opening that door to someone else’s definition of the term. You’re clearly well read on the Third Reich and likely aware that most of Hitler’s actions were mere extensions of the eugenics laws from the Weimar Republic that preceded them. What you start off with can easily escalate to something you couldn’t have imagined.

    “To claim that a disagreement about that means that Nazis should be able to propagate their attack on entire minority groups, in American Nazism Women being one of the groups under attack as can be seen in what was said about Heather Heyer by the Nazis after one of their own murdered her.”

    But their lies are just that, lies. I would insist the problem is less what they say and more that people believe them. I blame the media for Trump far more than the man himself because they were the ones eager to report on him endlessly as a sensationalistic, tabloidish candidate rather than the pathological liar he is. But I blame the public most of all for not thinking critically about the election.

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  5. “Your example isn't what I was talking about. Though it is a fact that, daily, in the United States, at least several Women are murdered because they are Women, that is according to the FBI, hardly a radical group.”

    I’ve certainly never argued contrary. But what has that to do with what I said?

    "I don't think 'the left' universally lionizes Lena Dunham, I think her act has its disturbing aspects, based mostly on saying outrageous things to get attention."

    So it’s the right that’s putting her on all those magazine covers? Giving her all that publicity? I’m not saying you, personally, are supporting her but you’re being dishonest if you’re trying to argue she’s not treated and endorsed as a champion for the progressive left despite her behavior and proven truthiness. Witness her "Vote for Hillary" commercial. I remember it well because I threw up in my mouth a bit when I watched it.

    “It is especially odd that you bring her up because your criticism that the truth isn't a matter of personal interpretation is exactly the one that the ‘free speech’ industry pose is based in.”

    I don’t disagree with you on the notion of how free speech should be used, but I do not agree that it should be prohibited by a governing body based on a rather vague standard of “the truth.”

    “It will power the kind of Nazism on display last weekend.”

    But the power to suppress speech won’t engender another kind of monstrous power? You’re willing to take the risk, but my job, as a librarian, is dependent on free access to information. I take my profession seriously, and I hear from both sides complaints about the materials we have. A young lady last week asked incredulously why we would be carrying that Milo Yiannopoulos book. I don’t think she was a Republican, and have no doubt she’d ban the book if she could. I reminded her that the library does not force anyone to read anything. I added, “That’s what teachers do.” She didn’t laugh.

    Karl Popper talks about the “Paradox of Tolerance,” and it’s true. “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” But he also reminds us that those who promise heaven on earth always seem to give us hell. And as I’ve previously mentioned the transference and abuse of power that has come with recent legislation, yes, I agree that free speech should not be used so mendaciously. But based on the petty, vindictive nature that seems to grow naturally from dwelling on identity politics, I’m weary of a culture so given to what Simone Weil called "collective passion."

    Look no further to the unlawful destruction of Confederate statues. Mind you, I think they should be removed, but by rule of law. Not an angry mob.

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    1. I'm tired so I won't deal with all of this, I don't think the very few lefty magazines and their editors and publishers constitute the universal set of the the left. I know more than a few people on the left who don't have any particular use for LD.

      "But the power to suppress speech won’t engender another kind of monstrous power? You’re willing to take the risk, but my job, as a librarian, is dependent on free access to information."

      As I've mentioned before the high-point of liberalism in the United States, back when the Congress would pass and Lyndon Johnson would sign into law things like the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicaid, Medicare, Title 9, etc. happened when there was not only a broadcasting code in place but pornography was illegal, there were no mainstream papers that carried overt sexual content and none would treat Nazism as if it were anything other than a complete and total evil. The silly dolts represented by the "do gooder" in The Walk Down Main Street, got their thrills from putting crap like Mein Kampf on the shelves of libraries out of the belief that they were being daring and shocking. Yet it was the high point of progress on so many issues, by today's standard, Lyndon Johnson and the Congressional leadership were radicals.

      I worked in a library, I know that the pose that everything must be put on the shelves is a lie because there isn't a library in the world where they don't both choose what goes on the shelves and what gets taken off of them because you not only can't carry everything, librarians make choices of what doesn't get or stay on the shelves, sometimes for quite arbitrary reasons. I doubt that 1 out of 1000 public libraries would choose to put "Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors," on the shelves and if they did they should be fired for grotesque irresponsibility. It is a book which we know inspired a would be professional hit man to murder a child, his night nurse and his mother so the child's father wouldn't have to pay child support and could get his hands on a trust fund set up for the child. We know that because there was a lawsuit which the publisher lost, spectacularly, though "civil libertarians" and "libertarians" whine and moan about it and mourn the demise of the book, knowing that they are almost certainly not going to be the ones killed by amoral scum who are inspired by how to kill for profit and get away with it lessons.

      Really, I used to have some respect for the profession of librarian but the profession has fallen into the same kind of double speak that so much else has.

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  6. “I don't think the very few lefty magazines and their editors and publishers constitute the universal set of the the left. I know more than a few people on the left who don't have any particular use for LD.”

    I work with younger people, especially women, who are progressive. Those few people you know are definitely in the minority on the left side of the aisle regarding her.

    “I worked in a library, I know that the pose that everything must be put on the shelves is a lie”

    Not everything. As Steven Wright once observed, “You can’t have everything – where would you put it?”

    “librarians make choices of what doesn't get or stay on the shelves, sometimes for quite arbitrary reasons.”

    None of us work in Borges’s Library of Babel, and yes, we must be selective in the materials we have with limited shelf space. It’s kind of our job. What we do not do is remove items in high demand because some people disagree with its content. That’s an irony I learned – while conservatives are more likely to question children’s literature, liberals are more consistently angered by the general collection. I had one angry, “woke” customer (patron) complain about displaying Styron’s ‘Confessions of Nat Turner’ during Black History Month because the author is a white man. I should have said, “So was John Brown.”

    “I doubt that 1 out of 1000 public libraries would choose to put ‘Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors,’ on the shelves and if they did they should be fired for grotesque irresponsibility.”

    We don’t have that one. Nor would I allow it. It’s the same reason we don’t have ‘The Turner Diaries’ or ‘The Anarchist Cookbook.’ If a small group of Nazi’s ask for the former it doesn’t mean I’m going to get it, because I have to consider the needs of the community as a whole. That book is written by and for a specific audience and has no use to the general reader, and I’d no more put that on the shelves than I would Stephen J. Gould’s ‘Pleistocene and Recent History of Subgenus Poecilozonites.’ ‘The Mismeasure of Man,’ we’ll have. There are too many other books that are requested, checked out and read to use our time or space on items with a narrowed readership.

    “Really, I used to have some respect for the profession of librarian but the profession has fallen into the same kind of double speak that so much else has.”

    Ironic you use the term “double speak.” Many progressives today seem to think Big Brother is a good idea. Provided they’re the ones watching.

    In closing, consider this:

    https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/reading-racism-in-dr-seuss/536625/

    Well, we’re still gonna have ‘The Cat In The Hat’ on the shelves, and ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’

    I don’t know if you want them removed, but I can promise you there’s going to be some misguided, ill-formed, all opinion no research SJW who is going to complain about those books somewhere.

    And this, by the way, is why Obama had to remind liberals to not “go around just looking for insults.”

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    1. I had a chance to ask my feminist, lesbian niece what she thought of Lena and she said she didn't particularly like her. I wouldn't, though, claim that I was acquainted with a sufficiently large number of my fellow lefties to be able to discern anything like a majority POV on LD.

      Your admission that librarians often make decisions of what not to put on the shelves on the basis of moral responsibility sort of refutes your claims in an earlier comment.

      I'm not advocating that Dr Seuss be taken off the shelves, am I? You can come up with all kinds of nonsensical examples or theoretical examples to obscure the fact that the Nazis are a group with an inherently murderous and racist ideology and that if they took power they would kill people on the basis of their identity. To pretend you can't discern that is part of the civil libertarian pose, it is also a lie.

      I would prefer that you not use the term SJW in comments, it is a phrase I associate with fascists and Nazis because I see it so often when researching them.

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  7. I work with women, mostly, as most librarians are. I am an exception. I'm genuinely stunned at the number of younger ones who think her better than sliced bread. But I live in a pretty red state.

    I think you're mixing up censoring materials and not purchasing and putting them on the shelves. 'The Turner Diaries' is not going on because it's a poorly written racist wet dream that will appeal to an extremely small number of our patrons. We want books that will go out frequently and come back finished. Something like that may get a few cursory check outs but it's the same reason we don't buy 300 copies of a James Patterson novel. And when they come out, sometimes there are that many hold requests. They're going to do nothing in a few months but take up space.

    I believe I wrote, no, I KNOW I wrote, "I don’t know if you want them removed," which was a joke. But issues like this I have to be aware of, because I while I didn't have to deal with the "Harry Potter is a Satanist" crowd, some of my older coworkers have told me stories. Some people are so eager to affect change that any change will do.

    I'm not denying the nature of the Nazis or their goals, but, again, I'm not a fan of outright censoring as much as I am common sense. My job is to serve the public, and despite the popularity of the genre, we don't have "mature" films either.

    As it is your blog I will do as you request. I use the term to distinguish between genuine progressives who think their positions through and those who simply react to stimuli they find offensive. Seth Meyers's writer Amber being one example of the latter. But I certainly don't wish to be lumped together with Nazis and fascists.

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    1. "'The Turner Diaries' is not going on because it's a poorly written racist wet dream that will appeal to an extremely small number of our patrons. We want books that will go out frequently and come back finished."

      What an odd stand to take. Why is that a good reason to not put the Turner Diaries on the shelf but that it is a book intended to encourage racist violence with the purpose of destroying egalitarian democracy in order to murder, literally, billions of people who aren't in William L. Pierce's conception of his master race?

      The idea that Harry Potter is Satanic is demonstrably untrue but that the Turner Diaries are intended to lead to genocidal mass murder is explicitly and demonstrably even more true. That it inspired a number of murderers, including Timothy McVeigh, Dylan Roof and other Nazis and assorted fascists and white supremacists is a matter of fact which is proven and in no need of further proof.

      I'd rather take my chances that a few of the wrong books might be banned because their guilt is ambiguous than that people are going to get murdered in Nazi violence. Books aren't alive. They don't have rights. Their authors don't have a right to try to get people killed through their encouragement. Any judges who are so stupid as to not be able to discern when that intention is explicit don't belong on the bench, any lawyer who claims to not be able to see that in instances such as the Turner Diaries belong under custodial care, not arguing cases before the Supreme Court.

      "Not-censoring" is a bizarre virtue when books have caused Third Reichs and movies have revived the moribund KKK.

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  8. Because what Pierce wants to happen is not going to be stopped by the book not being on the shelf of the library. Movements aren't born like Athena - fully formed - into power. It's the job go law enforcement to monitor and police hate groups, and I'm not arrogant nor naïve enough to imagine our job more important.

    To some conservative Christians, any book that makes heroes of people practicing magic (or, "the dark arts") is Satanic ipso facto. Not that I agree with that, but if those are their axioms, where else can you go from there?

    Re: McVeigh, Roof, etc. I'm pretty sure they owned the book, and not because they first "discovered" it in a local library.

    I would prefer not to.

    Censoring is easy in your mind. Letting it loose in the real world, that's where the problems start.

    Books are not alive, nor do they have rights. But nor do they force people to do anything. Inspire, sure? But they're often one factor in multitudes. There are plenty of people who commit random acts of senseless violence without reading Pierce or Hitler. Hell, I'm willing to bet most Nazis didn't actually read Hitler's whole book.

    Those books have been around for decades, and I don't think this current surge of Nazism is the result of more people getting 'The Turner Diaries' from their local library.

    I'd argue our cultural obsession with identity politics and terms like "white privilege" are doing more to cause it than garbage books like those.

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    1. If you could show me incidents of murder and mass murder, such as those commited by Dylan Roof and Timothy McVeigh, that were attributable to them having found instruction in Harry Potter, you might have a leg to stand on. The fact is that The Turner Diaries provided the inspiration of both and the instructions to McVeigh and his co-conspirators. Both of them and a number of other American Nazis have acted according to the stated intentions of William L. Pierce to kill people, in accord with their shared ideology.

      Just as Hit Man inspired at least one would be professional hit man to murder three people, as proven to more than a preponderance of the evidence, the author and publisher are responsible for the results of what they published. That was adjudicated in a court, with cross examination, and, among other things, the publisher agreed to destroy all unsold copies of the book, something that idiot, irresponsible, murderer enabling libertarians whinge and moan about, even today. I had an argument with David Gorski aka "Orac" on that point. When I asked him if he, in his free speech absolutism, would be OK with someone publishing an article advocating someone kill him if he'd be as OK with that as he was with stuff that gets people, in fact, killed. He shut up at that point.

      That there are other people who take that same poison in in smaller doses, second hand and do terrible things with it does nothing to lessen the role of the original books, articles, etc. in getting people killed, depriving innocent people of all of their real rights, rights which you, yourself, admit books don't have.

      The libertarian position on this is based in total irresponsibility and complete unreality. It is criminally insane.

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  9. I never argued Harry Potter caused and/or inspired people to murder anyone. Nor, so far as I can tell, have any of those think them "Satanic," though I imagine they think Satanic is the Lavey nonsense.

    I did use the word "inspire" because I agree, but that's not the same as causing, and I don't think it unreasonable to image McVeigh reading another book or watching a movie and getting another, equally destructive idea in his head. That is my point. I'm more concerned with the bombers than the books.

    That "Hit Man" book you mention, if what you're offering is true, has nothing to do with the library. If the publisher has admitted what they did in court there is no reason to have one on our shelves. Libertarians love to whine and moan. I don't think they could exist without those emotions.

    [How funny is it that Gary Johnson, goofy as he is, is actually one of the better spoken, more reasonable of them!]

    I'm just not convinced getting rid of those books will stop anything. And I'm also convinced identity politics will encourage further isolation and violence.

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    1. There is all the world of difference between hysterical claims that something like Harry Potter is Satanic and admitting that Nazism, its literature is based in the supposed biological salubrity of genocide. One is a delusional fantasy, the other is admitting what the authors say and its real, all too real potential to be enacted in nightmares of mass murder. The entire purpose of Nazi literature is to inspire people to adopt the ideas and put them into practice.

      Getting rid of books like The Turner Diary would certainly have prevented the murders inspired by it, if Roof and McVeigh hadn't read it there is no reason to believe they would have committed the crimes called for in it.

      By the way, "McVeigh" is a variant of "Macbeth". I assume through a consonant shift or the pronunciation of "b" in Scotland. Hope I haven't raised the devil by typing the name of the Scotsman.

      I will admit that Johnson is less goofy than the striptease candidate at their convention, and he wouldn't have been so ridiculous if he hadn't been so grotesquely obese and revolting. I am in favor of clothing required in public. If for no other reason than hygiene.

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  10. I would not deny that, but I'm concerned with the people who try to put those ideas into action than the books that contain them.

    Those specific murders? Yes. But that doesn't mean, as I wrote before, that they wouldn't have been inspired by something else to commit an equally destructive crime. Again, worry about the bombers, not the books.

    Did NOT know that.

    I'm just referring to the fact that Johnson was called out by others at the convention for saying things like "Driver's licenses are a good idea!" Glad you say that, I'm too cis and straight to make like observations and not get called out as being...something. Taste, modesty and hygiene are a part of the past I'd like to bring with us to the future.

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    1. The problem with that argument is that those murderers DID read those books, they did emulate the behavior encouraged in them. In the case of the "hit man" who did kill the child, his night nurse and his mother so the child's father could take control of the trust fund set up to care for the child, he admitted he learned what he tried to do from Hit Man. Speculating on whether or not he or McVeigh or Roof would have done what they did if they'd read to do it in some other book, from some video or video game does nothing to change the fact that the books were written and published with the intent to get people killed. WE DO KNOW THAT.

      I don't really know what "cis" means and don't use the term. I don't think you have to be gay to find that fat red-headed guy stripping as a nomination speech gross. It was, really, a good representation of what's wrong with libertarians, their grotesque immaturity, foremost.

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