I’ve got a bigger post on green culture on the way, but in the meanwhile (and because I’ve lost his name before) I’d like to direct your attention to Wang Chong, an obscure Taoist who – in addition to having a name which we must find hilarious – was not only one of the few Chinese philosophers to come from humble origins but also profoundly skeptical, coming to incorrect conclusions frequently but tearing the superstitions of his time a new asshole. From Wikipedia:

People say that spirits are the souls of dead men. That being the case, spirits should always appear naked, for surely it is not contended that clothes have souls as well as men.

I’m Glenn Beck / and I’m here to say
The IRA are smuggling drugs in my mouth / On Kolob I will be Jesus’s favorite wife
Bamboo, Obama, connect the dots people / Oh God the Arabs are watching again

Prophesy is an interesting word, partially because it doesn’t actually mean anything*; it is the verbal form of prophecy, and a fairly predominantly American Evangelical phenomenon. It rests on a wackily fundamental misunderstanding, and it’s everywhere.
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On alicublog, which remains one of my favorite blogs, Roy Edroso addressed the potential hate speech prosecution of Dutch kulturkampfer Geert Wilders in the same way he did the earlier legal complaint against Mark Steyn:

Hear, hear. Wilders is a wretched bigot, but here in the states we let them rave.

I didn’t respond before, bu it’s this kind of thing that pisses me off. In the US, we let them rave because we have a legal tradition protecting speech and a broad right to freedom of speech and press encoded in the Constitution. The Netherlands is not the United States. Neither is Canada, for that matter. Different nations have the right to their own legal traditions. If you want to argue that the specific American concept of freedom of speech is an inalienable right, do that; just be honest about what you’re doing.

I live in Oregon. We have an even stronger constitutional protection of free speech than the US Constitution. It’s so broadly interpreted that it’s been repeatedly applied by the state supreme court to regulations banning all-nude stripping. Other states may put their exotic dancers under the unfair yoke of “pasties” or “g-strings,” but in God’s own country, that 18-year-old has a right, enshrined in 150 years of glorious tradition, to display her unobscured genitals to drunk guys for money for as long as she damn well pleases. Other states don’t have that protection, and that’s why there’s so many strip clubs on the Oregon-Idaho border. Is Oregon right, and Idaho wrong? Is the federal interpretation of free speech right, and the Oregonian interpretation wrong?

Israel banned Meir Kahane’s Kach party and prevented him for standing for office for basically the same thing — openly campaigning for the persecution and exclusion of a large minority of his country’s citizens. I can’t remember the last time I heard a free-speechy liberal mourning Kahane’s persecution, and for good reason. The United States is large, and its race-warriors have generally either been marginal or in control of the reins of state. Hate speech has never been as dangerous here.

Have you seen Fitna? In the context of Wilders’ political stances and demands, and the current climate in the Netherlands, it can only be seen as incitatory — an attempt to depict Islam as incompatible with Western laws and ideals, and Muslims as ineligible for protection under those laws and ideals. Ultimately, whether Wilders has broken Dutch law is up to the Dutch people. Hate speech laws would be unconstitutional in the United States, and I oppose them completely. But while freedom of speech is an inalienable right, whether hate speech is as well is another question.

Oh, and Roy? Must you, must you quote someone who uses the word “dhimmitude” unironically?

Hello there, *campers*. I’m Thuryl, II*D*’s Australian correspondent, here to bring you news from the other side of the world (or, if you are on this side of the world, this side of the world).

Before that little election or whatever it was that you Americans held a few months ago, some of you contacted me about the possibility of moving over here in the event that McCain won. To you, dear friends, I say: you’re ignorant fuckwits who know nothing about Australia. At the best of times, we manage to be slightly less horrible than you. My purpose here will mostly be to show you just how bad we are.

The media over here are already getting tired of reporting on Obama’s inauguration and looking for news further afield. Today, they’ve managed to latch onto a misogynistic lecture by Abu Hamza, an “Islamic cleric” who runs a small Muslim social club about 10 minutes’ drive away from my home. (Wonderful term, that, isn’t it? Don’t bother researching whether he’s widely respected or has any kind of recognition outside his own congregation; just call him a “cleric” and be done with it. Do people go around referring to street preachers as “Christian clerics”?)

Now, this lecture was delivered back in 2003, and Abu Hamza hasn’t done anything much in the public eye since then, so the only purpose anyone could have for digging it up and kicking up a fuss about it today is race-baiting. It’s not as if it’s even a slow news day, for heaven’s sake. Yes, the lecture is pretty repulsive: among other things, it argues that a married woman has no right to refuse her husband’s sexual advances. On the other hand, this is still the Catholic Church’s official position on marriage. The Vatican is a damn sight more influential than Abu Hamza, and yet somehow people find it easier to believe that a Catholic can disagree with the Vatican than that a Muslim can disagree with whichever “cleric” has been trotted out and demonised this week. Or, if you happen to be a Protestant, look at, say, your own Phyllis Schlafly. Civil authorities don’t do much better than religious ones on the issue, either: spousal rape was completely legal in Australia until 1985, and many police still don’t take it seriously.

I seem to recall something in a book I read once about removing the log from your own eye before pointing out the speck in your neighbour’s.

Today is the last Martin Luther King Junior day to be observed under George W. Bush; he is, in spite of himself, an icon for the religious right – in the temple of a sort of Aryan superhero a grand emissary from Mammon incongruously welcomed.

The next one will be observed under Barack Obama; such is the nature of our polity that he represents (for now) the relative left, a man of centrist convictions generally aligned with the neo-liberal movement, a sighted lunatic in a nation of blind lunatics, a Lodge or Rockefeller surrounded by Goldwaters.

I can’t expect, as long as the religious right continues to dominate the media’s picture of ‘religious issues’ and the right-wing power-structure remains in place, that we will see a national candidate, or really even a national figure, similar to King. The Christian left has these days been relegated to the sidelines, pushed into common cause with soft-rightists and eccentrics.

Martin Luther King Junior Day 2009 will be celebrated under an evangelical reactionary, and Martin Luther King Junior Day 2010 under America’s closest equivalent to a Christian Democrat. We can at least take some comfort in the country’s rejection of the alternative.

(EDIT: By some inexplicable thinko, I managed to misname the principal subject of this article – and in spite of looking at it repeatedly for some time have only just now realized. Outside of the vague resemblance between ‘k’ and ‘d’ and the fact that this article was dashed out fairly quickly, I can offer no real excuse for this; it is simply unfortunate that it fell into the beginning of a long period of personal infirmity and I didn’t notice earlier. MGC. AK)

1. Lies about George Soros by American right-wing pseudopopulists — the better to induct him into their spooky ethnic villain pantheon, a sort of Captain Planet in reverse — generally paint him the exact way Bernard Madoff is: an intensely communitarian, money-grubbing Jew. He is not quite literally a vampire, but he’s been involved in his share of theft and ethnic palm-greasing.

(POINT OF CLARITY: This is the major bit of this essay I felt somewhat uncomfortable about, if only because the subject of powerful Jews is so mixed up with cultural baggage that people are inevitably going to read this as endorsement of something it isn’t. So for the record, within the financier class Madoff is typical as an aspiring big-man but atypical as a Jew. Most of his colleagues – and I would guess even a majority of people funding Zionist charities in the US – are white Christians, largely evangelical protestants. The main thrust of the domestic Zionist project, in which Makoff involved himself as an aspirant capitalist aristocrat, is basically to set specific parameters on the social pressures on American Jews – and, most importantly, to assimilate them as much as possible into a specific subculture with a somewhat unrealistic, idealized relationship with Israel – a relationship that has become increasingly obsolete and replaced with what they regard as an unwelcome cynicism.)

“The Jews just aren’t a big issue in Louisiana. We keep telling David [Duke], stick to attacking the blacks. There’s no point in going after the Jews, you just piss them off and nobody here cares about them anyway.”

former Duke campaign manager, 1990

He is a sort of hypertrophied representative of the worst tendency among the worst, most well-discussed group (the reactionary upper-middle-class) in American Judaism – to live up to its worst stereotypes and fail to live up to the better one. They aren’t a people apart, but they are deeply invested in the idea of it.
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December 14, 2008 — Peking. Like the Greatest Generation’s doughty moral struggle against our implacable enemies, the show is over but the fallout and thousands upon thousands of incinerated schoolchildren remain. These are the secrets of the election and its candidates that – while shared by other intrepid truth-seekers elsewhere – are published by It Is *Dancing*!!!! as an exclusive Internet scoop. Ladies and gentlemen, hold onto your dicks, cuz here come the mohel:

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Nuuuuh! Looks like the paranoid lefties’n Realist swine think a coupla troops add up t’martial law! Hyuk-hyuk-hyuk.

Jesus Christ. While I’m used to how consistently wrong the establishment’s favorite line (back the badge, then backpedal) winds up being, it’s rare to see it revealed wrong so goddamn quickly. The militarization of the convention police departments (especially the RNC’s) was regarded as a necessary precaution against radicals; and even reliable liberals ignored what amounted to the decision of the securitarian establishment to throw the Third Amendment out (evidently out of spite, because Jesus, the third amendment? Was ignoring fishing licensing too much work or something?) – and now we have clear signs that the country plans to have a full division stationed domestically – and live.

Falling empires tend to take one of two trajectories: a grand moment of clarity and the sloughing of the imperial clothes after a bitter external struggle (the Netherlands; France; the UK) or violent, overcompensatory oppression of their home subjects in ways pioneered in the Empire (Russia). I was hoping that we would have the former; turns out that our professional death-squad cheerleaders can’t stand the thought of our dwindling veto power over our subjects’ destiny will be the end of civilians being destroyed with M16s. Sorry, blacks!