Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

why is immigration so important to democrats?
 

in Europe and the US there is a large group of people who favor an immigration pattern which is changing the social makeup of their countries. An obvious question is why do they favor this policy? An obvious answer is they want to change the makeup of their society. Which is not very fair to the people who like their country and society the way it is and want to see it stay the same.

I think people have to act politically at the town and county level. Pass laws that say the people of the county are the ones who control their borders. To be a resident of the country you have to get approval. Put in place tariffs on imports from China.

To be practical you have to address things at the state level. The feds are causing so many problems for the people in the US. Setup a framework of what states can do on their own. Like control immigration. What they cannot do. Like prevent the passage of commerce and other traffic thru their state.

lame conversation. Does not address the issue.
 

the issue is, how do people who are concerned that immigration is disempowering them, taking their country away from them ( remember the cries of people at tea party rallys that they want their country back ), how do they peacefully and effectively make their views heard and yielded to?

Immigration is causing real problems in the US. The ballooning costs of the social safety net is possibly due to the ever growing non native population of the country. ( 9 or the top 10 zip codes for SSDI payments are in Puerto Rico. ) There are going to be shortages of natural resources in the world. The more people in the country the less we will be able to provide our own needs with renewable resources.

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

Everything is already ideological; and even if it weren't, declaring something non-ideological is an inherently ideological statement.

Re: lame conversation. Does not address the issue.
 

Puerto Rico is part of the United States.


Ideological is closely related to Idiot.

chamblee54

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

While it's silly to think you can call Breivik a Christian Fundamentalist, he appears to have believed it, although he doesn't appear to have been shouting "body of Christ" as he slaughtered schoolkids in the manner that Islamic terrorists shout "Allahu Akbar" when they kill innocents. This is only one of the distinctions between his sick philosophy and the religion of peace.

He defintely appears to be much more political and anti-religion (Islam) then pro-Christian. I liken him much closer to Theodore Kaczynski, someone who doesn't like the way the world is changing and feels killing people is the best way to advertise his protest manifesto. You have to wonder if he even comprehends that he's not only set back his cause perhaps irreversably but also perhaps performed ignition for anti-sharia violence. Then again that also could be exactly what he wants.

Now that he's gone on his rampage, another real danger is the loss of the message on just how messed up and delusional the left in Norway is. I had no idea about the blatant anti-semitism or that:

"A couple of years ago, when Jørn Holme, head of security services for the Norwegian police, showed up at a meeting sponsored by the Muslim Students Association, supposedly to discuss terrorism, surveillance, and the Muslim community, his main goal seemed to be to bond with the Muslims in attendance by putting down ethnic Norwegians (who, he said, were “too stupid to understand that there is no connection” between Islam and terrorism) as well as white American Christians (“In the United States in the sixties,” he told the audience, “blacks were raped by whites who went to church the next day”). Holme called the United States “human-rights-violation-country number one”.

source

Interesting also is that (as far as I know) the only group to seek credit for his deeds was not Christian but Islamic (which also led many, me included, to falsely blame Islamists). It's even comical to see so many denounce those of us who did when there is a pretty good record of islamic terrorism and an Islamic group claimed credit. Compare that to Tea partiers being blamed for Tucson when there was no record at all of past crimes. I've heard even Sarah Palin has been named as an accomplice to Breivik.

Even more illustrative are media outlets who jump to label him a christian (the NYTimes did it in the first sentence) when their reports of Islamic terrorism acts never mention the religion.

Earth to Michelle, the people pointing out the problems with Islam and the Islamification of Europe did not create Brevik, Brevik created Brevik and the problems of Islam are solely the responsibility of Muslims.

Re: lame conversation. Does not address the issue.
 

I am presenting high SSDI payments to residents of Puerto Rico as a factoid that indicates that immigrant communities are consuming a lot of federal social safety net resources. I would be interested to see the employment rate of 2nd generation hispanics vs 1st generation. My guess is the 2nd generation consumes more federal money than the 1st.

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

Mark Steyn is "full of shit" because a single, pro-Christian, right wing radical killed a bunch of people? Non-sequitur. Mike Dougherty needs to stop being such a punching bag in these talks. Is he supposed to be representing an ALTERNATE point of view, or just nod in moderate agreement with the main thrust of Goldberg's points?

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

Mr. Steyn needs more fiber in his diet.
I heard him on the Michael Medved show once. (Mr. Medved is equally constipated.) Mr. Steyn said that the Democrats had the banners and ribbons ordered for the defeat party. ( for the war in Babylon)
Part of the surge strategy has been happy talk in the press about how we "won" in Iraq. Before this, the idea was to blame the "Defeatacrats" for the conduct of the war. Mr. Steyn was an enthusiastic player, at least when he had a book to promote.
chamblee54

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

That's like saying that being non-religious is inherently being religious, which is ridiculous.

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

29:50 - Norway is a decent and generous place? Stealing from your hard-working citizens to reward indolents is not generosity, it is theft. Sure, Norwegians are a decent bunch, but I think that they're child-like in a grown-up world. The proper response to this horrible mass slaughter is to call for just retribution. Instead, Norwegian law apparently allows only for a maximum sentence of 21 years. This man will be guilty as hell and free as a bird in 21 years, after murdering God knows how many people. There is absolutely nothing decent about that, and I'm sure the parents of the young children who were murdered on this island would absolutely disagree about how wonderful it is to live in a country where you can slaughter 76 children and be out in 21 years.

I commend the Norwegian Prime Minister's call to maintain humanity, but mercy for miscreants like this man is not humane, it is in fact unjust. This man should be given the chair.

Democrats not irate over the shootings
 

Compared to the Giffords shooting, there is minimal democrat reaction to the Norway massacre in the US. HuffPo is not faulting Fox news or the tea party. I don't understand. Should'nt the FBI be heightening its scrutiny of republican looking people to make sure there are no copycat attacks in the US?

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

Islamophobia And Mass Murder
by Mark Steyn

I have been away from the Internet for the weekend, and return to find myself being fitted out for a supporting role in Friday’s evil slaughter in Norway. The mass murderer Breivik published a 1,500-page “manifesto.” It quotes me, as well as several friends of NR — Theodore Dalrymple, Daniel Pipes, Roger Scruton, Melanie Phillips, Daniel Hannan (plus various pieces from NR by Rod Dreher and others) — and many other people, including Churchill, Gandhi, Orwell, Jefferson, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, not to mention the U.S. Declaration of Independence.* Those new “hate speech” codes the Left is already clamoring for might find it easier just to list the authors Europeans will still be allowed to read.

It is unclear how seriously this “manifesto” should be taken. Parts of it simply cut and paste chunks of the last big killer “manifesto” by Ted Kaczynski, with the occasional [insert-your-cause-here] word substitute replacing the Unabomber’s obsessions with Breivik’s. This would seem an odd technique to use for a sincerely meant political statement. The entire document is strangely anglocentric – in among the citations of NR and The Washington Times, there’s not a lot about Norway.

Nevertheless, Breivik’s manifesto seems to be determining the narrative in the anglophone media. The opening sentence from USA Today:

Islamophobia has reached a mass murder level in Norway as the confessed killer claims he sought to combat encroachment by Muslims into his country and Europe.

So, if a blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavian kills dozens of other blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavians, that’s now an “Islamophobic” mass murder? As far as we know, not a single Muslim was among the victims. Islamophobia seems an eccentric perspective to apply to this atrocity, and comes close to making the actual dead mere bit players in their own murder. Yet the Associated Press is on board:

Security Beefed Up At UK Mosques After Norway Massacre.

But again: No mosque was targeted in Norway. A member of the country’s second political party gunned down members of its first. But, in the merest evolution of post-9/11 syndrome, Muslims are now the preferred victims even in a story in which they are entirely absent. A Tweeter thinks that “turning this scumbag’s atrocity in Norway into a lesson about how Mark Steyn and his ilk are douchebags seems… opportunistic,” but that’s the least of it. Even by the elastic definitions of “Islamophobia,” the angle being pursued is bizarre and profoundly tasteless: A rambling Internet pdf is trumping the facts on the ground — trumping the specifics of what occurred, and the victims. This man Breivik may think he’s making history and bestriding the geopolitical currents and the clash of civilizations, but in the end he went and shot up his neighbors. Why let his self-aggrandizing bury the reality?

Any of us who write are obliged to weigh our words, and accept the consequences of them. But, when a Norwegian man is citing Locke and Burke as a prelude to gunning down dozens of Norwegian teenagers, he is lost in his own psychoses. Free societies can survive the occasional Breivik. If Norway responds to this as the Left appears to wish, by shriveling even further the bounds of public discourse, freedom will have a tougher time.

[*and Darwin.]

Re: Democrats not irate over the shootings
 

Watch out Steve. They're keeping it on the lowdown. The FBI and other agencies are working in stealth to root out the ammo hoarders and secessionists. Your IP address is not safe here at bhtv ... just saying.

Re: lame conversation. Does not address the issue.
 

Why isn't it "the issue", and what does that mean anyway?

Their views are being broadcast loud and clear. I hear them every day. As to how to have their views yielded to, there's no guarantee of that in a Democracy.

Re: why is immigration so important to democrats?
 

So counties should have tariffs on imports from China? and should control their borders? Sounds like we would have as many walls and fences as the Palestinian territories. Apparently you want to "change the makeup of [our] society" in unimaginably drastic ways -- which would not be fair to me who likes the country much more the way it is.

Or maybe (I can't quite tell) you have some 2nd thoughts about the country level, and only want to see militarized borders between states (that's what I think it would be called if you have border and border enforcement systems capable of preventing free passage).

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

I was disappointed with this diavlog, but it did irritate me enough, to make me think. What most galled me was the repeated and unsuccessful attempts to characterize Anders Breivik in any definitive way, and then the sloppy allusions to contemporary ideological fashions or pundits. Breivik might have alluded to pundits, but I think that disguises rather than makes clear what he might have meant. I don't plan to read Breivik's manuscript. I'm taking time out to write this before I sit down to study today for my grad comps, but I'm also angry that Breivik ruined my celebrations on the end of a summer college session on Friday. The first sentence my wife uttered when I got off work was, "Did you hear about the terrorism in Norway?" And, that was her word, "Terrorism", so maybe the South Korean press was more judicious than the American outlets.

My initial and lasting impression, based on Goldberg's account of the manuscript, is that Breivik is a small-c European conservative, more de Maistre than Burke, and possibly a conservative fascist. I don't routinely recommend Wikipedia, but I think its account of conservatism is a good starting place. The wiki also points out well the pragmatic nature of conservatism, both ideologically and politically, which I would argue would account for the seeming incoherence of Breivik's arguments. I saw a Google link today, that Breivik argued that Australia's former PM John Howard was a model leader. Christianity and conservatism are not necessarily related, either, but there is a pragmatic fusion of the two. There's even a liberal variant. Dougherty isn't wrong when he uses the thumbnail version of conservatism, but he misses the regard for culture and the traditions that both preserve a people and distinguish it from other peoples. Montesquieu is also a good place to start for this ideological trend. This jives with Breivik's emphasis on anti-feminism, but the pragmatic element also matches his call for liberal oases and coopting certain Muslim practices.

Another wiki on fascism points out that fascism and conservatism are not necessarily the same, but do share certain family resemblances. That might account for the revolutionary elements Dougherty discerns, because fascism borrowed from Marxism and aother socialist movements.

Mostly, I would call Breivik anti-democratic, and this is what worries me most about this discussion and his manuscript's influence. I'm concerned about the essentialist arguments in the diavlog that miss the the point, that modernity is a matter of accepting political compromise. As a political science/IR/philosophy student, it's my task to understand just how politics works. But, so often, pundits resort to essentialist arguments to explain complex events and eschew empirical evidence and complex explanations. Instead of just looking at Breivik's mind - a really depressing task - I look forward to a decent judicial investigation of his acts, not just a reading of his work. But, I think Breivik's example is a warnng against picking that ONE solution to a perceived problem, and instead participating in political action and learning how politics works. I respect the man or woman who gets frustrated with politics after a lifetime more than the punk whose twisted logic and limited experience hits a brief wall of testing.

[Added] it's interesting how in the context of conservatism's pragmatism, that Bret Stephens tries to distance Breivik from the respectable brand of rightwing nutjoband calls him "...the irruption of an impulse—more psychological than political—that defines a broader swath of the ideological spectrum than most people would care to acknowledge." And then, Stephens takes the easy route and uses that canard, "evil incarnate". how can you claim to be a pundit, and yet be unable to resist such a term?

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

So, now you would tell the Norwegians how to judge and conduct their affairs? Please, don't tell us you have a manuscript in your drawer, too!

Re: Democrats not irate over the shootings
 

Apparently nobody thinks that, but if you want to waste your wonderful ironic wit on figments of your imagination, I guess there's no stopping you.

Re: Democrats not irate over the shootings
 

I know. I worry about that. Imagine being locked up just so a government worker could pad his pension.

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

Not just the Norwegians. I tell everyone how they should judge and conduct their affairs. Including you. Some people can actually use their brain to come to conclusions about whether the Norwegians, or any other people, are managing their affairs correctly or not, as opposed to mindless moral relativists.

I better not speculate about what kind of brain malfunction/meltdown/never had it to begin with led to this comment.

Be Wery Quiet! apple's hunting wabbits in Norway!
 

Oh, those mythical moral relativists!

apple...Elmer Fudd! What's up, Doc!

Re: Be Wery Quiet! apple's hunting wabbits in Norway!
 

Unfortunately, you are anything but a myth. Too uninteresting and insipid. And your morally relativist rant about people not having the right to tell Norwegians what to do is also not a myth, sadly.

Re: why is immigration so important to democrats?
 

yes, the county level is not practical. But it is very unfair what downstate NY does to upstate. Western NY has no chance to develop its economy because of the level of taxation and social programs put in place by downstate voters.

As far as disappointing those who want the US to stay the way it is, do such people also want Canada and Mexico to be incorporated as an even bigger country? Are they disappointed that the UN does not have more authority? And if states and regions of the US could gain autonomy, then regions like the NorthEast could petition to become a part of Eastern Canada. That would be a lot of territory.

Re: Democrats not irate over the shootings
 

Maybe you should burn that manuscript! Maybe Bob - because he's so nice and liberal - will grant a special request to delete all your comments before someone compiles them into the next "The Will to Power"!

Re: Be Wery Quiet! apple's hunting wabbits in Norway!
 

Do tell us about moral relativism!

Re: Be Wery Quiet! apple's hunting wabbits in Norway!
 

Why do I need to explain your (lack of) philosophy?

Re: Be Wery Quiet! apple's hunting wabbits in Norway!
 

Because I'd prefer you spend time here rather than try to outdo Breivik.

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

It seems the problem is an unwillingness by the left to acknowledge that forcing rapid change upon people will cause problems. Just like forced school integration in the United States, social engineering has consequences. I'd like a bit more discussion about how policy is implemented. Liberals frequently overestimate the ability for society to change quickly and they are quick to dismiss any disagreement as backwardness. Backward or not, the consequences can be dire.

Re: Be Wery Quiet! apple's hunting wabbits in Norway!
 

Put away the crackpipe, will you, kid? It's not good for you.

And yes, I just told you how to live your life (such as it is).

Re: Be Wery Quiet! apple's hunting wabbits in Norway!
 

I'm still waiting for the lecture on "moral relativism"! Can't do it, huh? That's a pity. You coulda been a contender!

Re: lame conversation. Does not address the issue.
 

Not exactly. It's not a country, it's not a state, it's a “low-tax regional center.”


"Microsoft has over 40,000 employees in the state of Washington in the United States. But they don't actually physically burn on to disks the software they develop. Instead, Microsoft, has a manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico employing 185 people that gets credited in Microsoft's books with a lion's share of Microsoft's Western hemisphere revenue and profits. It's making disks that's the really important thing that Microsoft does.

Despite all you've heard about Microsoft being a software company, they are actually a manufacturing company, at least for tax accounting purposes. To the IRS, Microsoft is basically a Puerto Rican, Irish and Singaporean industrial goliath with a money-losing R&D outpost in Redmond, WA."

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

The world is a far more peaceful place than ever before. It's just our skewed sense of reality because of sensationalist journalism with a profit incentive to make news as entertaining as possible. Besides, a punk willing to live outside the rules of the state is free in the truest sense. What can you really do to prevent these outliers from expressing their animal freedom? I don't think a complicated answer will suffice, let alone the one true answer.

Then again, I'm a pessimist, through and through.

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

What problems of Islam are those?

Re: Be Wery Quiet! apple's hunting wabbits in Norway!
 

And I'm still waiting for Mr. Incoherent to make some sense. Now that's something that's due to inability and not unwillingness, unlike my refusal to provide you with a proper education.

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

It's no crime to have convictions, but it is immoral not to have doubts.

Re: Be Wery Quiet! apple's hunting wabbits in Norway!
 

Or, a modicum of prudence - the authorities might be reading this. But, please [wink, pucker] try!

And, I've already made an argument, that Breivik is an anti-democratic conservative. What have you got?

Re: Be Wery Quiet! apple's hunting wabbits in Norway!
 

I don't think you need to worry. If the authorities were after mental cases, you'd be a lifer by now. Or maybe they're just confident that you're so 'out there' that you'll follow in the footsteps of Peregrinus Proteus.

Here, to compensate you for the sad state you're in, I'll hand you what your heart most desires: a banana.

Re: Be Wery Quiet! apple's hunting wabbits in Norway!
 

You're so strong. I can't wait for the explosion!

Seriously, stop with the transference.

Re: Values Added: Terror in Norway (Michelle Goldberg & Michael B. Dougherty)
 

Disagree with me = potential mass murderer. Interesting debate tactic.

3,098 killed by Muslims in America in 67 attacks probably isn't enough so go for the gold - draw a picture of Muhammed and picket it in front of a mosque.