As bad as the clergy?

Racism and 'Redface' Halloween costumesinsult American Indians

Until the liberals pushed them aside using the power of basically dishonest courts, the priests and pastors in each state were the censors of public morals as reflected in every form of public expression.

But the liberals have not really freed us.

They have merely replaced the clergy as America's censors.

The differences we note in public expression reflect differences between the values of the American clergy and those of the American liberals.

That’s all that has happened.

You aren’t really more free.

You are just more, and less, free to express yourself in different ways.

Meet the new boss.

Not quite the same as the old boss.

But too close for comfort. 

"The end justifies the means," you say. And what justifies the end?

There is a story that a traveler in Soviet Russia remarked to a communist official something like, "Well, I see lots of broken eggs. But where is the omelet?"

What if the end proposed is altogether imaginary?

A city of the godly? 

A worker's paradise?

And, anyway, ends are a matter of personal taste.

None are compulsory - apart from actual compulsion, of course.

And it is ordinarily just such compulsion - nay, it is ordinarily violence, and even great violence, rather than any lesser evil - that is the means people who talk like that refer to.

Always the means is something widely regarded as wrong.

Come to that, not so very infrequently, so is the end.

Making Europe free of Jews, for example.

And yet that Machiavellian maxim is often cited by way of claiming the moral high ground, as one who makes a great and terrible personal sacrifice.

Humans are such evil animals.

Women are the greatest hypocrites

They rise to the height of hypocrisy when blaming - or condoning - the identical hypocrisy of others.

They are veritable geniuses of fraud.

Look at what a job they have done establishing the ridiculous reversal of the truth that prostitution is a case of men exploiting women.

The mission of every animal in God's plan.

Eat, sleep, fuck, die.

And, as for the fucking, that's only if you get to adulthood and it works out that way.

Reproduce?

Well, it's a bit chancy, that.

Also, that is nature's plan, under the same conditions and equally with no guarantees.

"Life according to nature"?

It's that.

What's it all for?

Nothing.

Why bother?

If you feel the need to ask there's probably no good answer for you.

Among atheist thinkers of the Occident, there is no agreement how to approach the question, whether a general answer is possible, whether individual answers are possible taking things case by case, or what answers might be attainable.

But the opinions are widespread that mostly it's just fear of death and baseless hope, doomed to disappointment, that keep us going.

No, not universal.

But widespread.

Every suicide is a witness against life, though if his survivors are angry that is usually not why.

They are angry because he has deserted them, abandoned them, left them alone, daunted, and discouraged, even afraid, or maybe alone to carry a burden he did not stay to help to bear, the weak, selfish bastard.

And those are the survivors who loved him.

The others are generally not angry because they never actually cared whether he lived or died.

But he is such a witness, all the same.

Greenwald vs. Cheney

Reminds me of Hitler vs. Stalin.

Must I side with either?

Not at all.

A liberal tells us how he feels about free speech. A typical liberal.

Let the students decide

"Some ideas deserve to be debated, and others should be confronted with baseball bats."

- Benito Mussolini, 1923.

Had you, didn't I?

It wasn’t Mussolini.

BooMan said that.

Only yesterday, I think. 

Highly quotable. 

At the mercy of individual psychopaths and fools

Graham to block appointments because Benghazi

The Framers did not intentionally put us at the mercy of lone wolf lunatics and idiots.

The senate did, with its infamously stupid rules.

But this is not that.

Graham is not a lone wolf, and this is just another facet of his party's systematic effort to break the government and obstruct all efforts of the Democrats to actually govern.

There are no Republican moderates.

They are all in on it.

Bah.

A Republican moderate is a fanatic with a yellow streak.

What is guilt?

Ask any pet owner.

Dogs feel guilt but cats don't care.

Is it that dogs have moral opinions?

Moral knowledge?

Pshaw.

But they can be cowed and cajoled and bullied, unlike cats.

Just like people.

Do people have moral knowledge?

An imaginary undertaking

Not political science, not anthropology, and not sociology, but political philosophy is an imaginary undertaking, as is normative ethics, the broader imaginary undertaking of which it is a part.

As is theology, of which religious or theocratic politics and ethics are parts.

If there is a real sense in which Nietzsche had no politics, that is only as it should be.

Certainly, an amoralist can in consistency have preferences about politics as he can about the weather.

But in no case will they be moral preferences, sensu strictu.

Nor, if he is an atheist, will his preferences be based on or reflect God's, or any god's, supposed will.

That is not to say that, apart from imaginary criticisms, preferences are immune to evaluation.

But it will not be a moral or religious evaluation.

Why, let them eat cake

Aliens, that is.

The ones who came to serve man and against whose culinary preferences we will have nothing to say, if we ourselves eat meat, as some vegetarians put it.

Forgetting no known humans dine on carnivores while abstaining from the flesh of herbivores.

No known animal at all, human or otherwise, cares much, if at all, what those he dines on dine on.

And anyway, even though we pretend to allow our conduct to be influenced, even determined, by imaginary considerations like God's will or natural justice, and sometimes think other humans truly do, these are not reasons to think aliens must.

But then, so far, they too are imaginary.