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logomachy--1. A dispute
about words. 2. A dispute carried on in words only; a battle of words.
logomachon--1. One who argues about words.
2. A word warrior.
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2004-03-16
Eight ontological similarities of Islam and Marxism
Eight ontological similarities of Islam and Marxism- Both Marxism and Islam are based on the ravings of bitter narcissists, who borrowed key concepts from the Judeo-Christian tradition. If you like, Islam and Marxism are Christian heresies.
- Marxism and Islam claim their sacred texts are complete blueprints that conflate the public and private orders, and both create totalitarian states in order to realize the perfect society on earth.
- Both believe in the primacy of the Will over an objective moral law. For Marxist-Leninists, the Party can do no wrong, since it is acting to produce the perfect society. Muslims believe that God is bound by no laws: He can declare a thing good today and evil tomorrow. Man can only submit.
- Both came by most of their adherents through conquest, subjugation, and forced conversion. Both Marxists and Muslims look forward to an end time when their creed will be universally victorious and the righteous will slaughter the infidel.
- Islam and Marxism claim to encompass the whole truth of human nature and of all Nature. In practice, Islamic and Marxist societies are governed by hatred, lying, envy, irrationality, a paranoiac disconnect from reality, and all the disasters consequent to a flagrant disregard for objective truth.
- Just as Marxism claims to be the way to prosperity and progress for the poor, Islam promises peace and heaven for the faithful. In practice, both produce ignorance and human degradation.
- Just as Soviet strategic doctrine divided the world into the "liberated (i.e., Marxist) zone" and the "contested zone" (i.e., the Free World), Islam divides the world into two camps, dar al-salaam, the house of peace (i.e., Muslims), and dar al-harb, the house of war (i.e., non-Muslims, or infidels).
- Finally, Marxists can live prosperous and even productive lives in a free society, but their ideology requires them to present themselves as heroically alienated, "in opposition", or part of a "resistance movement". Likewise, Muslims can live personally exemplary lives in a society that gives short shrift to violence and irrationality, but it is abhorrent to all Islamic authorities that a Muslim should be subject to the rules of infidel society.
After 70 years of Cold War, the Marxist threat to freedom was ended without destroying all Marxists and Marxist enclaves. The West endured 700 years of Islamic jihad before decisively turning back Islam, but did not clear Islam from the non-European lands it had conquered.
Now, after a 450-year respite, Islam is resurgent. This time Islamic societies seem to be driven mad by the unavoidable observation that the Western infidel is happy, prosperous, and free, while Muslims live in fly-specked tyrannical dungheaps. No less than before, freedom must be defended and its enemies decisively defeated, but this time we must carry the war to them.
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2004-03-15
Kerry me back to old Bohemia
Kerry me back to old Bohemia
Posted on the American Dialect Society's listserv:
A recent issue of the German magazine Spiegel (1 March 2004, p. 109) tells how John Kerry's grandfather came to have the last name Kerry. The story probably appears in John Kerry's autobiography:
(translation): "In contrast [to the blueblood origin of the mother's side of the family], the Kerrys have a prosaic family tree. The grandfather of the little JFK [i.e., John Forbes Kerry, vs. President JFK] was actually named Fritz Kohn and was a Jew from Bohemia. Before his emigration in 1904, he looked over a map, selected a new name based on the Irish county Kerry and converted to Catholicism." Ah, fait' an' begorrah, but the name Fritz Kerry brings the mim'ries back behin' th' eyeballs. Sure, an' a fine broth of a boy he was, an' minny a day were the Fritzes and the Fitzes in and out o' one another's yards, stealing one another's cattle, as long as the sun did shine.
But why become Catholic, and then leave Bohemia. Or did Fritz convert and then have to leave? In any case, I'll bet it was a shock to arrive in Boston and find that being Irish Catholic was but small improvement on being Jewish. With a bit of luck and a better map, he'd have become Presbyterian and changed his name to Lowell. Another Jewish immigrant did that once, so the story goes, giving rise to the rhyme, This is the town of Boston,
home of the bean and the cod,
where the Cabots speak only to Lowells,
and the Lowells speak Yiddish, by God! The poster's name is Cohen. I want to be there when he addresses John F. "Band of Mongols" Kerry as "Cousin John" and gets the famous Kerry "Do you know who I am" treatment.
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