Archive for 3/21/2004

Guilty of Being Innocent

Britain’s Labor Home Secretary is suing people wrongfully imprisoned for crimes they did not commit to pay for the costs of their incarceration.
Diana Hsieh comments:

John McManus of the Scottish Miscarriage of Justice Organisation put his finger on the issue in saying that the government seems “to want to punish people for having the audacity to be innocent.” Well, perhaps that’s no surprise, given that they also want to punish people for the audacity of defending themselves against criminals.

Hamas leader killed in Israeli airstrike

Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas was just killed in an Israeli airstrike. MSNBC was quick to point out that he was a quadriplegic, but not that he has been planned uncounted terrorist attacks, openly assassinated IDF soldiers, and murdered many Palestinian “spies.” Earlier this year, he made his stance clear: “Muslims should threaten Western interests and strike them everywhere.” We should celebrate the fact that Israel has made it’s anti-terrorist stance clear – and demand that our leaders do likewise.

My Favorite Streaming Internet Radio Stations

A long time ago, I discovered my school’s file-sharing network and stopped buying music CD’s. Some time after that, I decided that while CD’s cost too much, stealing music is wrong. So, I switched to streaming internet radio, and have been listening to various streaming stations ever since. I’d like to share some of my favorites – just keep in mind that I listen to this while working or studying, so I prefer music that I can play in the background without distracting me too much. Feel free to comment with the streaming stations you like.

  • Yahoo Launch offers personalized music streams and lets to rank your favorite genres/artists/albums/artists. They have a free ad-based and premium stations.
  • Club977 is a “commercial free” 80’s station.
  • Soma FM offers “Groove Salad,” a “ tasty plate of ambient beats and grooves. Takes the edge off work.”
  • Digitally Imported offers a number of great stations including hard/soft/euro techno and classical stations.
  • Shoutcast is a directory of thousands of free streaming stations playable with WinAmp.

“Overcoming Affirmative Action”

The Young Republicans group at Roger Williams University recently offered a $250 “why you are proud of your white heritage” scholarship contest. Following up on their lead, the Young Conservatives at my own Texas A&M have created a $10,000 “Overcoming Affirmative Action Essay Contest” that open to everyone.

The scholarship follows up on an “Affirmative Action Bake Sale” and other provocative actions by conservative groups across the nation. Such demonstrations rely on a strategy of reductio ad absurdum, “a type of logical argument where we assume a claim for the sake of argument, arrive at an absurd result, and then conclude the original assumption must have been wrong, since it gave us this absurd result.” The assumed claim is that an individual’s identity and personal worth are determined by ethnic/racial membership. The absurd conclusion is that Caucasians are just as entitled to ethnic pride and entitlements as other ethnicities. Therefore, one should conclude that neither whites nor any other group is entitled to racial pride or entitlements based on un-chosen traits.

While reductio ad absurdum can make a powerful emotional impact, it has a major pitfall as a method of persuasion: it requires that one’s opponent rejects the “absurd” conclusion — and that they do so for the same reasons. It is not a logical argument, as much as a means of getting someone to see the inconsistency of his own position. In this case, the shared idea is that racism is wrong. White-only entitlements are meant to make people realize that racism is wrong no matter which group it favors. The problem is that advocates of multiculturalism do not reject the “absurd” conclusion for the same reasons because they do not hold a proper definition of “racism.”

Liberals are incapable of recognizing that one’s mind determines one’s identity and achievements, not his social/racial/ethnic group. Because of this basic premise, they cannot imagine an alternative to class or race-based discrimination. Hence, they reject white-only entitlements not because they are racist, but because they favor the wrong ethnic group. Their concept of “racism” means, “discrimination based on the belief that some groups are superior to others.” This definition fails to recognize the distinction between discrimination based on superior values and discrimination based on inherited traits. In practice, this means that the only “racism” that they recognize is that directed by a dominant group towards a weaker one – whether it is whites against blacks or Israel against the PLO, or successful businessmen “against” bums or the terrorists against America. Decades of public-school indoctrination has embedded such collectivist attitudes in the American public. Conservatives themselves are unable to recognize the root of racism because they accept their own collectivist doctrine of “original sin.”

While the Young Conservative’s protests are effective means of bringing attention to the multiculturalism that dominates our schools, only an explicit recognition of the individual’s mind and a rejection of collectivism can provide the intellectual ammunition necessary to combat it.

Interesting story on the WWII internment of Japanese Americans: A PC “Day of Remembrance” forgets key facts.