TOP TEN THINGS AMERICAN LIBERALS USED TO SAY, BUT DON'T SAY ANYMORE

The face of American liberal tolerance

by Andy Nowicki

(10) "I would never vote for a warmonger. For the sake of future generations, we must seek peace instead of provoking conflict."

(9) "All of this anti-Russia hysteria - this looking for dangerous subversives under every bed - is silly and embarrassing. Really, it's nothing more than a politically-motivated witch hunt. Knock it off, already!"

BRITAIN STRIPS JIHADIST OF PASSPORT DESPITE SUPPLYING WEAPONS TO HIS ISLAMIST GROUP IN SYRIA

by Kevin Scott

The youngest son of Abu Hamza has been stripped of his British passport after travelling to Syria to fight with jihadists. The Home Office has withdrawn the passport of Sufiyan Mustafa, 22, leaving him effectively stateless and stranded in Syria.

His Egyptian father, now 58, is currently in jail in the US after being convicted of a series of terrorism offences and has been serving his sentence in solitary confinement at a high security jail in Florence, Colorado.

WEAPONS OF LOVE, DILDOS OF HYPOCRISY

"Suck on it White boy."

by Peter Anderson

Pope Dildo the First has spoken! It's Easter time so the world's billion or so Catholics expect the floppy-eared Argentinian prelate to chirp up with something around this time. But this year, with his traditional Easter message delivered at a mass in Rome's St. Peter's Square, he has outdone himself.

With Easter so close to the latest terrorist atrocity in a Catholic country, he inevitably had something to say about how to defeat the evils of terrorism. But be sure, not a single anti-terrrorism expert anywhere in the world was taking notes.

NOBEL SAVAGES

The Machiavellis of the North

by Colin Liddell

It’s that time of year again, when a few forgotten scientists, a largely unread writer, and some organization or individual that may or may not have done something for World Peace are given Nobel prizes. The actual awards ceremony usually comes in December, but just so the winners have enough time to book a flight to Stockholm and rent a tux, the announcements are made round about this time. But is the Nobel Prize what it seems, or is it the manifestation of something a lot more sinister?

Most people take it at face value, seeing it as a fitting conclusion to some presumably worthy scientific (or other) career – although most remain oblivious as to why this or that individual should win it over their peers. Most also remain decidedly foggy on how the prize winners are actually selected, both officially and with regard to the behind-the-scene string pulling and other factors that no doubt tip the scales this way or that.

But to see the Nobel Prize merely as an innocent award is to take it on its own terms, and thus to have your perceptions framed and shaped by it. This means you accept its projected image: as a fair and objective expression of "the progressive spirit of mankind" (a nebulous concept with admixtures of other nebulous concepts: 'science,' 'peace,' 'excellence,' 'univeralism,' etc.), and you also accept the implied association of this "positive" image with Scandinavia in general and Sweden in particular, without giving it too much thought.

In short, the Nobel Prize is subtle, under-the-radar, positive brainwashing for Sweden.

FULL-SPECTRUM CYNICISM

by Daniel Spaulding

Encapsulating his view of the essence of politics, Vladimir Lenin famously asked “who, whom,” that is to say, what matters in power relationships is who does what to whom. Under the elaborate trappings of abstract, supposedly universal morals, this brutal and obscene maxim has long been the West’s primary operating principle in international affairs.

This week’s Washington-backed Saudi attack on the country of Yemen is a reminder of this cynical practice. Saudi warplanes, supplied with US intelligence data, began bombing Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, in an effort to dislodge the Shiite Houthi militias from their positions. A few weeks earlier these tribal mountain fighters had ousted Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, Yemen’s puppet president, and seized control not only of the capital, but also of large swathes of the country.

DON'T MESS WITH MOHAMMED: A TALE OF TWO PROPHETS

Note: this article was originally posted at The Last Ditch in March 2006. At that time, a Danish magazine's publication of unflattering depictions of Mohammed had touched off riots across much of the Muslim world, resulting in mass destruction and several mob-instigated murders. The article is reposted here and now in 2015, as the points it makes are tragically once again quite relevant in light of last Tuesday's Charlie Hebdo massacre carried out by radical Islamists in Paris.

"He's a prophet and a pusher, partly truth and partly fiction."

by Andy Nowicki

The now-notorious Mohammed cartoons published in Denmark last year have in fact a historical, as well as geographical, precedent. In 1845, a satirical Danish journal named Corsair ran a series of cartoons mocking the appearance of Copenhagen author and personality — and later renowned philosopher and Christian polemicist — Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). The cartoons highlighted the writer's baggy, ill-fitting clothes, particularly focusing attention upon his chronically uneven pant legs.

PETS OF CONVENIENCE

She was a PoET, bitch!

by William Solniger

Some time ago – as most readers will remember – the white people of progressive America hung their sinful heads in reverence as a low-tone, monotonous jangle (such as might be made by a large hollow object falling to the ground), accompanied by a hot, angry gust of wind (such as might be let out of an artificially-inflated receptacle), reverberated with the dull sepulchral echo of state-sanctified mediocrity across their troubled land. The hollow object was Maya Angelou and her so-called “poetry”; the hot bag of air was Ta-Nehisi Coates and his so-called “case for slavery reparations”; and given that these two had been puffed up to such giant proportions by the ethos of affirmative action, none in the establishment media dared to question that the cacophony emanating from them was anything other than an oracle of Social Justice.

DEGENERATE MORALITY

                     

by William Solniger

Anyone who has seriously tried to practise any sort of virtue, however meagre, will know the necessity of making a habit of it – not just “knowing” it theoretically, but engraving it into his very being by constant repetition, so that he becomes what he repeatedly does. Because of this necessity for constant repetition, virtue cannot be left to the “important things” alone, but must permeate the insignificant and trivial ones as well. This is why the Hagakure contains the advice that “small matters should be taken seriously”; and this is perhaps also the reason behind the more arbitrary and petty aspects of religious and traditional codes.

In any case, it is a concept sorely neglected in the present day, as relativism provides the ultimate excuse to force all forms of virtue to bend and flex in the wind of particular circumstances and situations. But someone who cannot practise virtue inflexibly and habitually is very rarely able to practise it at all. Contrary to the belief of almost all of our contemporaries, someone who is accustomed to telling thousands of gentle lies and half-truths in everyday life cannot simply put down his habit of dishonesty to think about “important things” like life, the world, and himself; and this is similar to the truth that, despite much fantasising to the contrary, someone who is accustomed to avoiding confrontation in small matters of honour will rarely be able to draw his courage from its rusty scabbard on an occasion when he really needs it.