The Thomas Chronicles

Well, just some news from the blogosphere. Mrs. Michelle Malkin has given her site a face-lift. So, stop on by her site and give her a look-see.

It’s been pretty busy these past few days, so my blogging has been light. I have a few things on the burner though.

1. More on illegal immigration

2. The conflagration taking place right now in the Gaza Strip and wider Mideast

3. The impending oil shortage report

The world seems on the verge, standing on the knife’s edge of another World War. I watched Foxnews this morning and took a few minutes to read the headlines when I got to my computer. There are just so many things happening and all at once. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see where things can potentially go…

Fresh from the Drudge Report…

“We are aware of this Turkish troops buildup on the border and the Iraqi government position has been that we will not accept or tolerate any military incursion into Iraqi territories,” he said.

“We have urged all sides, including the Kurdish leadership, to ease tension and to seek dialogue to resolve all outstanding issues because we believe any military incursion into the northern provinces would only lead to further escalations and instability and this is in nobody’s interests, not in Iraq’s, nor the United States, nor Turkey,” he added. “We are in contact with the Turkish officials and we have friendly, good relations with the Turkish government.”

According to this article from Breitbart.com, Turkish military incursions into Northern Iraq was fairly frequent before Operation Iraqi Freedom. U.S. Lt. Col. Christopher Garver can’t confirm anything at the moment but said that we were “very concerned”.

Just what in tar-nation is going on over there?

I began writing a post earlier today, and for some reason, it is growing like a weed (or rather an elegant vine depending on whether or not you’ll enjoy it.). Unfortunately, because the words are multiplying like bacteria in a petri dish, I’ll probably not finish it today. Definitely tomorrow though.

(shrug)

What can I do? Words with me have a way of taking on a life of its own sometimes; kind of like a clown pulling an never-ending handkerchief from his bowler hat. Robert Heinlein once described this need to write as a monkey that climbs on his back. When it started, it demanded only 3,000 words at a time… by the time he grumbled in his grave, that monkey was demanded tens of thousands of words.

I’m taking a brief break. I’ve just got my wisdom teeth yanked from me, so I’m not quite all here, y’know?

It’s been an unsurprisingly busy morning. Work comes in avalanches on Wednesdays. First, a trickle. Then a stream. Then a deluge.

More posts to come in a bit…

Last week, while waiting in between Law and Order episodes (They’re just re-runs on TNT, but still worth the watch), I puzzled over a question that’s been nagging at me for some time.

Why is it, as we become more indecisive as a people and are less able to tell the difference between good and evil, that we are more prone to sudden bursts of self-righteous violence? Even our entertainment reflects this growing sense of barbarity— some movies, like Saw, are becoming no different than snuff films. The fact that it’s “fake” doesn’t mean a thing.

It seems almost a one-for-one direct relationship. The more we are unable to identify the good and the evil, the more violent we become, as if moral ambiguity spurs on our degradation.

I presented this question to a friend of mine and he offered me two incisive insights into cowardice and liberty.

Cowardice

For our grandparents and generations preceding them, they knew that the sudden lunge to attack, the hair-trigger temper and the endless posturing toward violence is cowardice. This mentality bespeaks of a person so weak, insecure and uncertain a character that he/she needs to resort to violence as the first and only response to validate themselves.

For example, the prototypical schoolyard bully is a person so excessively weak in character that he must lash out at every apparent slight to his august person. I say “apparent” because it does not need to be a slight in fact but only a slight in the bullies’ emotions, which makes everyone hostage to his oh-so sensitive feelings.

In fact, what used to be one of the defining difference between the Occidental civilization and Oriental civilization is how their values are inverted from one another. What the West used to call cowardice, the Orient raised up as the ideal, as evinced by what they considered to be a “strong man”, which had more to do with fear and intimidation than character and respect.

And without a doubt, our grandparents would consider the Islamofascists cowards, just as they considered Adolf Hitler a ridiculous “paper-hanging sonofab**ch”.

Liberty

Concomitantly, freedom and liberty cannot exist without objectivity. You cannot be a relativist and have liberty since there is no objective standard by which you can measure yourself against.

If everything is relative, everyone would have the anarchy of possessing “a right to their own opinions” without the rational hindrance of so petty a thing as facts. The only law and order you will have is one that is imposed upon you.

Yep, you guessed it. That order is called tyranny.

Relativism and Subjectivism, by definition, denies objectivity and moral certainty and champions the narcissistic indulgence of the sensual and the insatiable need for self-advancement.

Of course, these ideas are very seductive, which is encapsulated in this slogan from the 1970’s, “Do whatever feels good.” Go ahead, indulge… you know you want to…

In no way do these blind ideologies of Self advance freedom and liberty. Actually, they not only retard and stifle liberty, but they pull it backward towards authoritarianism.

Freedom and liberty, on the other hand, require objective standards to exist at all. Without objective standards, the common questions occur: Freedom and liberty from what? Freedom and liberty to do what? Why are these ideas “good”, if “good” don’t mean a thing in relativistic terms? Why is it superior and preferable over dictatorship and tyranny?

Many people extol the solidity and stability of the rule of law, but what would be the rule of law for a relative society? In light of the Libby conviction last week, we are beginning to see our first few glimpses of what the rule of law would mean for a relative society.

Nothing. It would mean nothing at all.

As Sir Thomas Moore said:

Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

When we twist laws to do what we want them to do, we hew them down as surely as erasing them or blotting them out with ink. What then when those twisted laws turn on you?

That’s the beauty of relativism. You can make words mean anything you want it to mean. A man can be exactly the same as he was on the day you revere him as on the day you revile him.

We only need to look at the President for an example…

Tentative Conclusion

So how do these things tie in together? Simple.

Relativism pulls out the rug of moral certainty and keeps people on shifting ground. The coward is by definition insecure and uncertain about himself and the world in which he inhabits. And the barbaric acts and the love of them are usually perpetrated by cowards.

I am not saying that all this is necessarily causative— from relativism, to cowardice, to violence— but it certainly creates an environment for these things to come to fruition. You can almost chart the rise in violence and violent entertainment in Western civilization with the assimilation of relativism/ subjectivism into the general populace.

Is it any wonder that we’re so indecisive in comparison to our grandparents generation?

We can’t even say that liberating millions of people from tyranny is essentially a good thing. Instead we wring our hands, angst ridden, wondering if we’ve done a good thing. Some even equate our actions in Iraq with the cowardice of the Muslim fanatics!

Is it also any wonder that the peace-at-any price crowd is also the most violent in word and deed? How many times have we heard their screeching? How many instances have we seen them resort to physical violence and brownshirt tactics in their “protests”?

Let’s take it out of the macro for a minute. To the reader, I am willing to guess that the most of the verbally violent people you know are the people who ascribe to relativism/ subjectivism. (This is outside the political realm of Left and Right because I’ve known so many people on the Right just as relativistic.)

In my experience, relativists are the most uncompromising of debaters and the least willing to view things from another’s point of view. This take-no-prisoners approach, of course, directly contradicts their professed beliefs. Why argue a point when it’s all relative and one view is just as good as another?

But I suppose they don’t let logic get in the way of being right… it’s too inconvenient.