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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend.... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (28267)	3/6/2008 11:20:28 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

To War is Human Mark Steyn The Corner Jonah, re 'The Invasion', I think the film-makers started out wanting to make an anti-Bush allegory - cue all those endless background news bulletins about Iraq - and then couldn't figure out how to make it fit the Body Snatchers narrative. And, insofar as the Russian guy's point that a world without war would be a world in which we're no longer human is the nearest thing to a coherent message, I'd bet it's an accidental one. Nonetheless, it's an interesting one. Since my legal travails up north, I've been struck by how many Canadians (and Europeans) sincerely believe that a better world can be built by giving the state the exclusive power to "ban hate" and enforce niceness. Such a world will by definition be totalitarian. I'm not proposing that the next remake of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers should be an allegory for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, not unless Hollywood really wants to lose a ton of dough. But nevertheless that fits the story's theme of bland conformity better than whatever Nicole Kidman was running through the streets perspiring over. A human society is a messy one: a lot of people will be "partisan" and "mean-spirited", others will be hateful and bigoted, a few will bomb and kill and maim. You hope that most folks will stay down the low-key end of that spectrum, and that those who don't will be resisted. But that is the price of remaining human, and the alternative - a state-mandated niceness - is fascistic. Hey, maybe there's a book in it, Jonah. (Oh, and needless to say, the original Body Snatchers is still the best.) corner.nationalreview.com 03/06 10:43 AM

To: Sully- who wrote (28267)	3/6/2008 11:34:29 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Hmmmm.... Comrade Baker refers to Conservative radio hosts as "HATE Jocks".... Too Human, Is War By Jonah Goldberg The Corner Mark - Agreed re 'The Invasion'. Remember that panic when your 7th grade science project was due in like an hour and there was no way you were going to get all of the planets in the solar system to hang right, or the volcano to erupt as desired, so you just threw together whatever you could? The ending of 'The Invasion' gave off a similar feel. Regarding hate, a couple weeks ago I listened to Dennis Prager give the keynoter at the Horowitz Freedom Center dinner in LA. Prager's got a great rabbinical presence and he gave a wonderful stem-winder on how he could never enter a 'hate-free zone' (apparently they want to make Berkeley or UCLA into some such thing) because Judaism instructs him to 'hate evil.' It was a nice variation on a familiar point. Hate can be good or bad depending on the object of our hatred. In other words, not only is hate not evil, but it is evil not to hate evil. I personally relish my hatred for people who torture puppies. I thought of this the other day when I brought my daughter to the FDR memorial (we didn't plan on it. We were feeding ducks and seagulls, our father-daughter activity of choice, nearby and she wanted to check it out). Amidst the various displays are some enormous stone slabs and cubes with different words arrayed on them in giant lettering. One of them was simply the words 'I Hate.' It was part of a larger quote from FDR about how he hated war (which is a very, very debatable point by the way). What was interesting is that from where I stood, all I could see were the words 'I Hate.' So here at the eternal shrine to the warrior-saint of American liberalism, the designers saw nothing wrong with advertising boldly that FDR was, in fact, a 'hater.' The obvious upshot, of course, is that when the left talks about 'hate' they don't mean anything of the sort. On one level, they mean that certain animosities, sentiments and even words cannot be used against their anointed hero-victims. Anti-hate is just the latest iteration of speech codes and sumptuary laws. But on another level, they are trying to say that those who violate these dictates are 'beyond the pale.' People like Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg et al are 'haters' -- irrational people, motivated by irritable mental gestures as Trilling might say. The arguments of 'haters' don't need to be heeded because 'hate' is always illegitimate, always irrational. In short, they use 'hater' as just another synonym for 'fascist.' You don't have to debate a fascist, or let him speak on campus. Likewise, you don't have to show 'tolerance' for haters because hate is the opposite of tolerance. But imagine if you said to one of these people that you don't hate Klansmen because hate is wrong. We should 'tolerate' bigots instead. Step back if you try this, because the ensuing cognitive dissonance is explosive. corner.nationalreview.com