Tag: history

Rationalist naivete

One of my great disappointments this year has been reading JB Bury’s History of Freedom of Thought. Bury was the editor of my much-beloved Cambridge Medieval History series, which is excellent, and so I was looking forward to reading his thoughts on a matter that is of more than a little interest to me.

But while the book is as erudite and well-sourced as one would expect, it is little more than a one-sided anti-Christian rationalist polemic, with little insight and absolutely no foresight whatsoever. It’s High Church Atheist in a manner that is about as proto-“I Fucking Love Science” as it is possible for a book published in 1913 to be.

One wishes one could bring Bury forward in time to see what passes for reason hath wrought; a thought police more authoritarian, more delusional, and more in conflict with reality than any of the religious opponents of the freedom of thought ever were. Bury’s unjustified faith in the power of reason is a fascinating precursor to the complete inability of the modern irreligious to grasp the connection between Christianity and many of the aspects of Western civilization that they value, as well as their willingness to blithely saw off the branches of the tree on which they are sitting.

The struggle of reason against authority has ended in what appears now to be a decisive and permanent victory for liberty. In the most civilized and progressive countries, freedom of discussion is recognized as a fundamental principle. In fact, we may say it is accepted as a test of enlightenment, and the man in the street is forward in acknowledging that countries like Russia and Spain, where opinion is more or less fettered, must on that account be considered less civilized than their neighbours. All intellectual people who count take it for granted that there is no subject in heaven or earth which ought not to be investigated without any deference or reference to theological assumptions. No man of science has any fear of publishing his researches, whatever consequences they may involve for current beliefs. Criticism of religious doctrines and of political and social institutions is free. Hopeful people may feel confident that the victory is permanent; that intellectual freedom is now assured to mankind as a possession for ever; that the future will see the collapse of those forces which still work against it and its gradual diffusion in the more backward parts of the earth. Yet history may suggest that this prospect is not assured. Can we be certain that there may not come a great set-back? For freedom of discussion and speculation was, as we saw, fully realized in the Greek and Roman world, and then an unforeseen force, in the shape of Christianity, came in and laid chains upon the human mind and suppressed freedom and imposed upon man a weary struggle to recover the freedom which he had lost. Is it not conceivable that something of the same kind may occur again? that some new force, emerging from the unknown, may surprise the world and cause a similar set-back?

The possibility cannot be denied, but there are some considerations which render it improbable (apart from a catastrophe sweeping away European culture). There are certain radical differences between the intellectual situation now and in antiquity. The facts known to the Greeks about the nature of the physical universe were few. Much that was taught was not proved. Compare what they knew and what we know about astronomy and geography—to take the two branches in which (besides mathematics) they made most progress. When there were so few demonstrated facts to work upon, there was the widest room for speculation. Now to suppress a number of rival theories in favour of one is a very different thing from suppressing whole systems of established facts. If one school of astronomers holds that the earth goes round the sun, another that the sun goes round the earth, but neither is able to demonstrate its proposition, it is easy for an authority, which has coercive power, to suppress one of them successfully. But once it is agreed by all astronomers that the earth goes round the sun, it is a hopeless task for any authority to compel men to accept a false view. In short, because she is in possession of a vast mass of ascertained facts about the nature of the universe, reason holds a much stronger position now than at the time when Christian theology led her captive.

All these facts are her fortifications. Again, it is difficult to see what can arrest the continuous progress of knowledge in the future. In ancient times this progress depended on a few; nowadays, many nations take part in the work. A general conviction of the importance of science prevails to-day, which did not prevail in Greece. And the circumstance that the advance of material civilization depends on science is perhaps a practical guarantee that scientific research will not come to an abrupt halt. In fact science is now a social institution, as much as religion.

I wonder if Bury would revise his conclusions in light of the “social construct” school of denial, which has produced everything from the “science” of anthropogenic global warming to multiplying sexes. Considering how ready the SJWs are to deny that a man is, in fact, a man, it is not at all hard to imagine that they would be every bit as willing to compel men to accept a false view of the sun rotating around the earth.

SJWism is the revival of the blasphemy concept, but it is far more dangerous than the religious laws ever were because it lacks a textual anchor. At least with religion, you always knew what blasphemy was and could readily avoid committing it. With the current thought police, they will inform you of your offenses after you have committed them, and neither ignorance of the law nor its previous nonexistence will provide you with any defense.

The dangerous faith

I doubt it has escaped anyone’s attention that with a few exceptions, the atheists, agnostics, and pagans around the world are content to make common cause with very nearly any religion except for one particular faith. As J.B. Bury observed nearly 100 years ago in his epic Cambridge Medieval History, which I cannot recommend more highly, this is not a new development:

Jesus Himself, had His followers allowed, might have had a place between Dionysos and Isis; but Christianity, which according to Porphyry had departed widely from the simple teaching of the mystic of Galilee, was sternly excluded from the Neoplatonist brotherhood of religions. Its idea of a creation in time seemed irreligious to Porphyry; its doctrine of the Incarnation introduced a false conception of the union between God and the world; its teaching about the end of all things he thought both irreverent and irreligious; above all things its claim to be the one religion, its exclusiveness, was hateful to him. He was too noble a man (philosopkus nobilis, says Augustine) not to sympathise with much in Christianity, and seems to have appreciated it more and more in his later writings Still his opinion remained unchanged: “The gods have declared Christ to have been most pious; he has become immortal, and by them his memory is cherished. Whereas the Christians are a polluted set, contaminated and enmeshed in error.” Christianity was the one religion to be fought against and if possible conquered.

What Neoplatonism did theoretically the force of circumstances accomplished on. the practical side. The Oriental creeds had not merely gained multitudes of private worshippers; they had forced their way among the public deities of Rome. Isis, Mithra, Sol Invictus, Dea Syra, the Great Mother, took their places alongside of Jupiter, Venus, Mars, etc., and the Sacra peregrina appeared on the calendar of public festivals. As most of these Oriental cults contained within them the monotheist idea it is possible that they might have fought for preeminence and each aspired to become the official religion of the Empire. But they all recognised Christianity to be a common danger, and M. Cumont has shewn that this feeling united them and made them think and act as one.

From Communists to Muslims to SJWs, various philosophies and religions have been more than happy to attempt to coopt Jesus Christ, because they believe he is dead. What they cannot countenance are the servants of the Living God, the followers of the Risen Christ, who despite our manifold failings, our observable flaws, our complete falling short of the glory of the God we worship, insist on attempting to tread upon the hard and narrow path rather than obediently follow the gentle, easy, thoughtless ways they advocate.

Christianity is the dangerous faith because it is the one faith that is rooted in truth rather than lies. It is the one real connection Man can make to the Divine. Yes, our understandings are imperfect, yes, we see as though through a glass, darkly, yes, our interpretations are various and contradictory, and yet, only in doing so, only through relentlessly pursuing the truth to the best of our ability can we begin to approach Truth.

Those who consider Christians to be self-righteous entirely miss the point, including those who consider themselves to be righteous Christians. To be forgiven is not the same as being sinless. To be repentant is not the same as to be blameless. It is not necessary to put on sackcloth and with Augustine melodramatically label ourselves the worst of all sinners to recognize that we are no better, and in some cases are considerably worse, than the virtuous pagan.

For better or for worse, we are who we are. We have done what we have done and we can never change the past. But what we don’t have to do is remain broken, frightened, sin-enslaved beings. That, through the grace of God, is the one thing we can change.

And that is what the enemies of God, in all their various guises, cannot abide. Because that is the one freedom they can never offer.

Immigration and idiocracy

This development in human devolution will be very difficult for the true believers in human progress or racial equality to explain away:

Our technology may be getting smarter, but a provocative new study suggests human intelligence is on the decline. In fact, it indicates that Westerners have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian Era.

What exactly explains this decline? Study co-author Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis, professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, points to the fact that women of high intelligence tend to have fewer children than do women of lower intelligence. This negative association between I.Q. and fertility has been demonstrated time and again in research over the last century.

But this isn’t the first evidence of a possible decline in human intelligence.

As for Dr. te Nijenhuis and colleagues, they analyzed the results of 14 intelligence studies conducted between 1884 to 2004, including one by Sir Francis Galton, an English anthropologist and a cousin of Charles Darwin. Each study gauged participants’ so-called visual reaction times — how long it took them to press a button in response to seeing a stimulus. Reaction time reflects a person’s mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence.

In the late 19th Century, visual reaction times averaged around 194 milliseconds, the analysis showed. In 2004 that time had grown to 275 milliseconds. Even though the machine gauging reaction time in the late 19th Century was less sophisticated than that used in recent years, Dr. te Nijenhuis told The Huffington Post that the old data is directly comparable to modern data.

It should hardly come as a surprise that the average level of intelligence has declined as less intelligent populations have become a larger percentage of the whole. It would be interesting to learn if that is a factor, or if the various intelligence studies are all of a homogenous Anglo-European population and the decline is even worse than it appears.

Remember, intelligence scores are always normalized to 100, so what is 100 in 2004 is not the same thing as 100 in 1884.

I don’t find this difficult to believe at all. There is virtually no one writing today that I regard as being on the same level as many past writers; it was astonishing to read how F.A. Hayek, in addition to refining Mises’s Impossibility of Socialist Calculation, refuting Keynes, and winning a Nobel Prize, also traced the intellectual roots of social justice before obliterating it 14 years before it became an observably significant cultural force.

Who do we have to compare to that? Paul Krugman? Steve Keen is the one and only economist doing anything that can even be remotely compared to the giants of even the relatively recent past.

Now, what could possibly account for an even more dramatic decline in average British intelligence?

Tests carried out in 1980 and in 2008 showed that the average 14-year-old was two IQ points cleverer in 1980, according to a study published in 2009. Scientists found that performance dropped the most dramatically in teenagers in the upper half of the intelligence scale, The Telegraph reported. Brighter teens who took part in the study in 2008 were on average six IQ points less intelligent than their counterparts tested 28 years earlier.

The 1980 UK census didn’t even take ethnicity into account. The 2011 census showed that the white population had dropped to 87.2 percent, down from 92 percent in 2001. It shouldn’t take an IQ much above the average to determine the reason for the decline in British intelligence over the last 28 years.

Diversity doesn’t only destroy a society, it makes it literally dumber. After all, you have to be pretty damn stupid and scientifically ignorant to believe in human equality anymore.

You can’t accommodate the Left

Sultan Knish explains the futility of trying to talk to, reason with, or accomodate the SJWs:

You can’t accommodate the left on social issues. You can’t accommodate it on fiscal issues. You can’t do it. Period.

The left exists to destroy you. It does not seek to co-exist with you. Its existence would lose all meaning. Any common ground will be used to temporarily achieve a goal before the useful idiots are kicked to the curb and denounced as bigots who are holding back progress.

The purpose of power is power. The left is not seeking to achieve a set of policy goals before kicking back and having a beer. The policy goals are means of destroying societies, nations and peoples before taking over. If you allow it a policy goal, it will ram that goal down your throat. It will implement it as abusively as it can possibly can before it moves on to the next battle.

It’s not about gay marriage. It’s not about cakes. It’s about power.

More fundamentally it’s about the difference in human nature between the people who want to be left alone and those who want power over others.

He’s absolutely right. There is ample historical precedent for their behavior and the eventual consequences of it. The moderate position is a complete nonstarter, as Brad Torgersen, among others, has learned. Read the whole thing.

Delusion and deterrence

Mr. Smith has a rather unusual theory about the Charleston church shootings:

Adam F. Smith ‏@Adampdx Jun 18
Haters like @castaliahouse  Theodore “Vox Day” Beale are the cause of massacre at SC AME church #SadPuppies #hugoawards

I look forward to the SJWs at File 770 being as horrified and outraged by this ludicrous accusation as they pretended to be by Mike Z. Williamson’s “too soon” joke. It’s particularly bizarre since I am not Castalia House and @castaliahouse has never taken any position on any American racial or religious affairs.

It’s rather amusing to see the many attacks by their own side the SJWs resolutely ignore as they go about their daily posturing and strike their latest outrage poses. Tor employees attack Tor’s authors and customers alike, Castalia House has undergone six straight months of cracking attempts, Vox Popoli is now into its third straight day of a DDOS attack, hundreds of people emailing Tor Books have been accused of being bots by Tor employees even as as Tor supporters create fake tweets to feign public support for Tor, and yet science fiction’s SJWs still preen and posture as if they’re the good guys because a few hundred science fiction readers followed the rules and violated an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement to which we were not privy and to which we never agreed.

And yet, some of those on our side still want to pretend this decades-long cultural conflict is some sort of white-glove affair. There is a fundamental disagreement between the noble defeatists and those who are less willing to continue to submit to the SJWs attempt to claim cultural dominance at Sarah Hoyt’s post on The Marquess of Queensbury’s rules:

thewriterinblack  
Another observation I have made in the past is that our enemies often not only know that we don’t play by the same “rulebook” as they do, they count on it. Those among the Jihadis who have even a ghost of a clue know that if we were really as bad as they make out, well, it would be easier to pray toward Mecca–just face the blue glow.

Apropos of nothing, I am reminded of a scene in an old Fantastic Four comment. Sue Storm as the Invisible Girl (I think this was before she started calling herself the Invisible Woman) facing Dr. Doom. “Doom, do you have any idea how dangerous my force fields would be if I decided to play by your rules?”

That’s us all over.

Dorothy Grant
And this would be why they hate and fear Vox Day above all others: because he does play by their rules.

RES
If we played by their rules the earth would be scorched. But playing by the Devil’s rules would be to concede defeat — what we fight for is ordered liberty, constrained government, rational argument over insanity.

Batman does not become the Joker, Superman does not accept the values of Luthor, Spiderman does not become Doc Octopus.

RES is completely wrong for the obvious reason that SJWs are not the Devil, they are merely his unhappy, not-very-bright children. And the vital point that RES completely misses is that you do not defend ordered liberty, constrained government, and rational argument over insanity with unconstrained liberty, government inaction, and talk. You defend it with force, and you defend it successfully with force that exceeds that of your opponent at the point of conflict.

The Romans did not become the Britons by defeating them with superior force. The USA did not become Nazi Germany by invading Normandy (although it may as a result of the 1965 Immigration Act). The Soviets did not become the Afghans and the Coalition of the Willing has not become the global jihad. Batman would not become the Joker even if he snapped the Joker’s neck, but he would certainly save the lives of all of those who would have been killed by the Joker in the future.

What frustrates me about the noble defeatists is that they are like a football team who refuses to accept the newfangled rules that permit the forward pass. They insist on playing the game in the outmoded way they believe to be the correct way, run the ball every down against a defense with 11 men stacked in the box, and inevitably lose when the other team passes for ten touchdowns and wins 70-0.

The problem is a conceptual one at heart. Even those whose devotion to free expression is unquestioned, such as Ken and Clarke of PopeHat, fail to understand that their efforts are doomed to failure so long as they confuse the objective with the methods used to defend it. This is not a “by any means” argument, it is a straightforward argument for Chicago Rules deterrence.

The best defense for free expression is not to permit the other side to freely libel and slander and calumniate and defame and lie while responding with few feeble protests that what they’re saying just ain’t so. The reason poison gas has made very few appearances on the battlefield since WWI is not because the French, English, and Americans set the Germans a good example, but because they promptly responded by manufacturing and using even more gas than the Germans did. The only reason the USA has not dropped an atomic bomb since 1945 is because the Soviet Union obtained their own in 1949.

Has the assault on free speech waxed or waned since Belgium introduced hate speech laws in 1981? The high-minded non-deterrent approach has failed, continuously failed, for the last three decades. The SJWs find speech-policing to be a useful weapon for marginalizing, disqualifying, and destroying their enemies and they are not going to give it up until they find themselves suffering from it to a greater extent than the free speech advocates do.

If you seek to defend free expression, you can do no better than to follow the lead of Lieutenant General Sir Charles Ferguson, who said of poison gas, which he deplored as a “cowardly” and un-English form of warfare:

“We cannot win this war unless we kill or incapacitate more of our enemies than they do of us, and if this can only be done by our copying the enemy in his choice of weapons, we must not refuse to do so.”

This does not mean we must blindly imitate the other side, particularly not in their instinctual resort to stupid and petty lies, transparent psychological projection, and a foolish insistence on defending the indefensible. Nor should we seek to be as blindly ignorant of them as they are of us. What it means is that we should adopt their more effective tactics, and, as the Allies did with gas in WWI, make even more effective and extensive use of those tactics until they agree to abandon them.

A historic privilege

In his landmark economics textbook, Paul Samuelson pointed out that domestic debt did not matter in the aggregate, with one notable exception.  He wrote: “The
interest on an internal debt is paid by Americans to Americans; there
is no direct loss of goods and services. When interest on the debt is
paid out of taxation, there is no direct loss of disposable income; Paul
receives what Peter loses, and sometimes – but only sometimes – Paul
and Peter are one and the same person…. In the future, some of our
grandchildren will be giving up goods and services to other
grandchildren. That is the nub of the matter. The only way we can impose
a direct burden on the future nation as a whole is by incurring an
external debt or by passing along less capital equipment to posterity.”

Setting aside whether it matters or not who owes what to whom, the recent report on external debt owed would therefore appear to be not entirely irrelevant in this regard.

The Treasury Department says overseas ownership of U.S. debt rose 2.1 percent in March to $6.18 trillion. That is below January’s record of $6.22 trillion. China added $37.3 billion of Treasury debt, bringing its stockpile to $1.26 trillion. That’s ahead of Japan, which added just $2.5 billion, lifting its total to $1.23 trillion.

In February, Japan became the leading owner of U.S. debt for the first time since August 2008. China overtook Japan that year as the Great Recession, higher government spending and a steep drop in tax revenue pushed up U.S. government borrowing.

As of the end of 2014, US government debt outstanding stood at $13 trillion. That means that with $6.18 trillion of it owed externally, 47.5 percent of the US public debt is of the sort that, even in Keynesian/Samuelsonian terms, imposes a direct burden on the future nation as a whole. And when you consider that the future USA – one can hardly call it a “nation” at this point – will be less white, less intelligent, and less productive on average, it should be readily apparent that the economy has absolutely no chance of growing itself out of the external debt owed regardless of which economic school of thought you belong.

What we are witnessing is nothing less than the gradual demise of the biggest, wealthiest economy in world history. It is truly a privilege and an education to behold. It is rather like being able to witness the death of the last Tyrannosaurus Rex. Regardless of how the fallout from the event may affect us personally, we have seen and experienced something that very few men have ever known.

I still remember living in Japan at the height of the Heisei Boom; I flew out of Narita less than five months before the consumption tax and the first round of monetary tightening marked the peak of that Golden Age and brought it to an end. In nearly three decades since, Japan has never again approached those heights of ease and luxury. Now we are looking at much the same thing, albeit on a considerably larger scale. But rather than mourn the recent past, we should appreciate it for the rare moment in history it was.

The Hobbesian Law was never abolished, it was merely held in abeyance for a time.

Fourth Generation disruptions

What applies to one field often applies to many. I thought this excerpt from Martin van Creveld’s Technology and War was interesting both in its own right and as it applies to the cultural war:

In practice, the difference between war and the deadliest games practiced by men consists precisely of the fact that, in war, the element of pure unbridled force is always present. Like a bolt of lightning coming out of a clear sky, it threatens to crash through the network of rules. Historically speaking, there have been many places and times when war began to resemble a game. Whenever this happened, there were people aplenty who chose to interpret the phenomenon as a sign that civilization was advancing, that eternal peace was possible, perhaps even that the millenium was about to arrive. On each of those occasions, however, sooner or later somebody came along who did not operate on the same code. Brandishing his sharp sword he tore apart the delicate fabric, revealing war for what it really was.

Nemesis, when it came, took different forms. The Hellenistic states, which had dominated the eastern Mediterranean, were laid low by the Romans who, to quote Polybius, were singularly inclined to use force (bia) in order to solve any problem. The jousts and other military games being played at the courts of France and Burgundy were rudely disrupted by Swiss pikemen and Spanish arquebusiers coming from “barbaric” countries on the fringe of civilization, nations that had never been properly feudalized. The European ancien régime was brought to an end when the French Revolution mobilized huge hordes of men and, unable to train them in the good old rules, hurled them forward at the enemy in formations that contemporaries regarded as crude but very effective. As might be expected, those who survived these eruptions often engaged in a spirited debate as to whether they involved progress or a reversion to barbarism. Though a disinterested historian writing long after the event might point out that they most probably represented both, this was scant consolation to the victims at the time.

To read the signs, our age also displays these symptoms. Partly because of the nuclear threat, partly because of the modern fascination with advanced technology per se, and partly for deeply rooted socio-ideological reasons, weapons are being turned into toys and conventional war into an elaborate, but fundamentally pointless, game. While games can be nice while they last, in our age too there is a real danger that they will be upset by barbarians who, refusing to abide by the rules, pick up the playing-board and use it to smash the opponent’s head. Let him who has ears to listen, listen: the call Lucifer ante portas already reverberates, and new forms of warfare are threatening to put an end to our delicate civilization.

It’s not an accident that there are similarities between the 4GW we are seeing throughout the Middle East and the 4GW we are seeing in the form of GamerGate. Both are reactions to overwhelming and irresistible centralized power; ISIS/DAESH could no more stand up to the US military in conventional battle than the average game player could influence the game media or the average SF novelist could expect to hit the New York Times bestseller list and be end-capped at Barnes & Noble without the support of a major New York publisher.

But technology and decentralization has allowed the Fourth Generation forces to bypass the conventional strong points. ISIS can coordinate global strikes from deep cover operatives anywhere in the world; a power not even the Emperor of Rome or the Queen of the British Empire possessed. A single gamer like Pew Die Pie has a bigger following than any game journalist. And, well, you already know about the Hugo Awards and the New York Times bestseller list has been rendered moot by Amazon’s.

This is a time of change, in both military and societal terms. As is usually the case, the change will NOT take the form that is expected by those who control the conventional forces, indeed, on the basis of past transitions, we can safely predict that those who have been most dependent upon the conventional models are the most likely to find themselves on the wrong side of techno-historical progress.

The end of Holocaustianity

I’m more than a little astonished that Israel’s government is so willing to throw away the moral high ground here:

Israel does not plan to recognize the Armenian genocide perpetrated by Turkey, Rafael Harpaz, Israel’s ambassador to Azerbaijan, told Azeri website Trend.

“Israel is a democratic country, everybody has two opinions, not one opinion,” Harpaz said. “The government has a very clear opinion.”

He said Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman had made Israel’s policy clear. Harpaz told Trend he hoped Israel’s troubled relations with Turkey would improve.

I suppose this decision makes sense from a geopolitical grand strategic point of view, kjkbut when seen through the Lind lense, it looks a lot more like a potentially disastrous move that could perhaps even be prosecuted in some European countries.

It seems to me that this will make Holocaust denial much easier to justify.

SJW strategy and Communist strategy

In reading “LEARNING FROM VIETNAM: THE PATTERNS OF LIBERATION MOVEMENTS” by Doan Van Toai and David Chanoff, I couldn’t help but notice that the pattern of SJW entryism in television, SF/F, and games appears to be rather similar to the successful Communist strategy in Vietnam

First among the lessons that Viet Nam teaches concerns the composition of liberation-war guerrilla movements…. After Dien Bien Phu (1954), non-Communist revolutionaries were still employed in the government to continue attracting popular support, even while all anti-Communist factions were being eliminated. It was only when Ho Chi Minh had sufficiently consolidated power that the turn of the nationalists and non-Party militants came. Exactly the same tactic was re-employed in the 1960s when the National Liberation Front was founded to rally all those who sympathized in any way with Communist goals….

There are two points to be made here, both obvious but often overlooked. One is that Communist “liberation war” strategy calls for the creation of guerrilla fronts representing many shades of political feeling, within which the Communists themselves are likely to be a minority. Antagonists are thus faced with an enemy which attracts diversified support and whose leadership is difficult to identify.

The foreign propaganda effect alone of such an organization is more than worth the minor risk to the Communist nucleus that it will be outmaneuvered by some temporarily allied faction. Foreign journalists, for example, can be counted on to make a cogent case for the moderate, the liberal, and the nationalist struggle for a homeland rather than for the Communist flavor of the guerrilla movement. They will note that apparently leading figures are intellectuals or religious leaders whose standpoints may be distinctly non-Communist. And over time their reportage will convey to their democratically and pluralistically inclined readers the impression of a movement that is itself “pluralistic,” and to that extent representative and even democratic….

There is also no doubt (and this is the second point) that the non-Communist elements in the guerrilla front will be destroyed as soon as feasible. Ton Due Thang, president of North Viet Nam’s Fatherland Front, succinctly characterized Communist strategy in this regard: “Rally all forces that can be rallied, neutralize all forces that can be neutralized, eliminate all forces that can be eliminated.”

Ton was referring here to the standard Communist device of shifting coalitions in order to make use of opposition forces and eventually eliminate them piecemeal. For example, to deal with three enemies, alliances are formed with two while the primary enemy is attacked. The process is then repeated until Communist power stands unopposed.

We’re already seeing the hard core SJWs turn on their less-committed allies. This also demonstrates the absolute importance of driving home to the moderates that they need to resist their urge to train their guns on their own side rather than the opposition. Moderates are always trying to curry favor with the opposition by criticizing their own “extremists”, but this is not only futile, it actually plays into the enemy’s strategy of shifting coalitions.

Notice in particular the importance that an ignorant media and controlling the public narrative plays in both strategies.

A historical crime?

Eight years of Obama have killed more people than the Spanish Inquisition:

Obama’s drone campaign has killed more people during the six years of his presidency than were killed the 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition.

In his speech on Thursday, he said:

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history.  And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.  In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

Fair enough. But how is Obama himself doing on that score?

Well, on Monday of this week the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published their annual study of deaths from U.S. drone strikes, and reported the following:

At least 2,464 people have now been killed by US drone strikes outside the country’s declared war zones since President Barack Obama’s inauguration six years ago, the Bureau’s latest monthly report reveals…. So how does that number of 2,464 killed in Obama’s drone program — not including those killed in Iraq or Afghanistan — compare to, say, the Spanish Inquisition?

About 2,250 people were tried and handed over to the crown, then executed, in the 356 years of the Spanish Inquisition. The Obama administration is nearly 50 times more murderous on an annual basis than the medieval institution he was criticizing. And whether or not you are convinced that the Inquisition’s victims got a fair trial, it should be noted that they did get a trial.

I always find it curious, too, when men conspicuously avoid mentioning the name of Jesus.