Ben Carson: There's a Lot of Extreme Language on Both Sides of the Abortion Debate

I can't get too excised about this because it's certainly true; there is a lot of very harsh talk on both sides. One may say this is justified; but of course the other side says that too. I don't think Carson is saying much here more than "We need to listen and speak softly if we are to persuade," which is generally true, if you're trying to make headway on an issue. If you have a different goal, that might not be true.

At any rate, people are now screaming that a would-be politician dared to say something politic.

Of course, this comes as the left takes a shooting and claims the only way to stop further shootings is to ban all political ideas they don't like, which of course they always do.

The Colorado governor says that the Planned Parenthood shooting is due to the rhetoric of "talk radio" and "bloggers."

Ed Morrissey catches the Washington Post saying the same thing.

He notes an example where the left does not find its own hot rhetoric linked to a murderer's rampage -- the Family Research Council shooter. I can name another one -- the Discover Channel Shooter, a shooter the left seized upon initially because they assumed he was rightwing, then discarded quickly when his manifesto indicated that he was so left-wing on climate change he thought the Discovery Channel was too soft in its climate change propaganda.

Gabriel Malor has documented the left's "incurable" disease of blaming shootings on right-wing speech.

But never, ever on leftwing speech -- obviously! Leftwing speech never inspires violence. Except when it does. And there's an interesting argument to explain why, and that argument is complete media silence.

I find this part of the left's broader mission of shutting down any thought of which they don't approve. The left routinely -- reflexively -- links any sort of political thought they don't like into a dire real-world consequence or crime.

If you deny the fake 1-in-5 claim, you're encouraging rape.

If you publicize the fact that baby organs are in fact being harvested at Planned Parenthood, you're encouraging shooting.

If you call a woman "bossy," you're both fostering an anti-woman "atmosphere" and encouraging violent crimes against women.

And so on. As I say, the left's own hot rhetoric -- that we need to reduce the human population to save us from global warming; that anyone who disagrees with this is a "denier" like a Holocaust denier; etc., etc. -- is never, apparently, linked to any violence.

There are several points to be made here:

1. The left is, of course, a group of vicious liars and nonstop propagandists entirely unwilling to engage even on their own claimed premises.

That is: If hot talk leads to violence, and therefore we must stop hot talk, why am I told, by some senior Democrat party officials, that anyone who disagrees with climate change should be prosecuted for a crime? Does this not tend to excite the passions of the strange-minded as well?)

2. It has become de rigeur on the left to claim that some political thoughts -- coincidentally, all of which are political thoughts hated by the left -- must simply be abandoned in order to forestall any possibility of violence.

Sorry, they say, we'd love to have that tumultuous marketplace-of-ideas you lads are always on about, but the dangers are just too great to allow it.

This is, of course, the censor's eternal apologetics for his censorship: Sure, we'd love to let you publish that book, Old Boy, but the threat to the public safety and national morals are just too great.

3. On that last point, several things should be kept in mind: The first is Justice Holmes' dissent from The People vs. Gitlow, a case about communists attempting to incite people into a revolution (which would, of course, involve violence). This dissent is now far more influential in constitutional law than the actual decision, which upheld the convictions for incitement.

On the idea that some ideas are so "hot" they may become an incitement to criminal action, Holmes says:

If what I think the correct test is applied, it is manifest that there was no present danger of an attempt to overthrow the government by force on the part of the admittedly small minority who shared the defendant's views. It is said that this manifesto was more than a theory, that it was an incitement. Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and, if believed, it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result. Eloquence may set fire to reason. But whatever may be thought of the redundant discourse before us, it had no chance of starting a present conflagration. If, in the long run, the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.

This is why the court has strictly limited (since then) such incitement laws: The speaker must expressly call for a crime to occur, and the danger of that crime occurring must be a clear and present one, not a speculative one.

The left, of course, ignores this (and ignores how this liberal spirit of speech kept their own brethren, and even they themselves, out of jail for decades), and wishes to use this sort of "ideas = murder" equation to attack its enemies.

4. One final thought: I believe, as you know, that the left is a cult, and is chiefly engaged in the mode of primitive, magical thinking.

Let me point out there are a huge number of superstitious about Speaking of Evil: That if an evil is spoken aloud, it might make that evil manifest in the world. This is why people rap twice on wood after talking about an event they fear could happen: the rapping on wood is supposed to be some kind of charm preventing that evil thought from gaining traction in the mud of reality.

Curses -- spoken words of evil wishes -- were (are) thought to somehow carry actual power to make those wishes into reality.

"Speak of the devil and soon he appears" may mean something else now -- it just means that you mentioned something in conversation, and suddenly it actually appears -- but it used to have a much more literal meaning:

Deriving from the Middle Ages, this proverb (which was, and to a certain extent still is, rendered as "Talk of the Devil...") was a superstitious prohibition against speaking directly of the Devil or of evil in general, which was considered to incite that party to appear, generally with unfortunate consequences. Its first printed usage in modern English can be found in Giovanni Torriano's Piazza Universale (1666), as "The English say, Talk of the Devil, and he's presently at your elbow."

The left engages, as I say, in magical thinking, but they dress up their primitive, archaic superstitious -- barely -- in allegedly "scientific" garb. Thus we get the "Gaia Hypothesis," proposing that the earth is actually a self-protecting deity -- metaphorically, you understand; the left wouldn't say the earth is actually a goddess. That's far too medieval for them. So they say it is metaphorically a goddess, and just happens to behave in every single fashion the way an actual goddess would, including raining fire and damnation upon those who offend Her.

Now, if you want to take that metaphor and maybe believe it's a bit more real than that... well, you're welcome to. But We didn't say She was actually a God. We just said She was metaphorically a goddess. Though We can quite understand how you could mistake Her for a real one...

In the case of speech, the left similarly engages in speak-of-the-devil/jinks/curse-type thinking to claim that any Evil Words they don't like will bring Evil Itself into the real world. The mechanism they propose for this is not straight magic, as the old version of the superstition had it.

No, just like they dress up their Goddess Earth language in some minor trappings of modernity, they have a different mechanism by which to explain how Evil Words work actual Evil in the real world: Because you add to the "atmosphere of hate" and the "climate of fear" and etc..

Rather than your words working in the magical aether that surrounds and interpenetrates the Material Plane, your words instead work by spreading mental contagions among the herdlike populations of human beings living upon this earth (curse them!).

The mechanism has undergone a slight modernization and rationalization -- your Evil Words lead, through social intercourse, to a Rube Goldberg type contraption where a single falling domino winds up, many collisions and contacts down the line, in a shooting at an abortion clinic -- but in broad summary this is no different at all from the various prohibitions against Speaking Evil.

It's magic -- but We are just too sophisticated now to call it that. We have new words to call Evil Magic Words, and those new words are "Rhetoric of Hatred."

For more on this idea (but don't comment in this post -- you'll get banned, because comments in old posts are considered spam by the system), read Enchanted Crocodiles, Mighty Sorcerers, and Lee Harvey Oswald.

As Carl Jung observed:

The civilized man of today shows these archaic processes as well, and not merely in the form of sporadic "throw-backs" fro the level of modern social life. On the contrary, every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic [primitive, shamanistic] man in the deeper levels of his psyche.

And no men are so archaic in their thoughts as the future primitives of the left.

posted by Ace at 02:53 PM

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