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Aug

3

The Council’s Voting Results Are . . .

Posted By: 'Okie' | 9:28 am — 8/3/2007 | 2 Comments See comments below:

Watcher's Council
Each week the Watcher’s Council presents a listing of posts and articles from the twelve Council members and non-Council pieces submitted by same, plus two non-Council works submitted by the Watcher. This week, the voting produced these results.

The Council winning post was NEA Also Confused About SCOTUS Decision Regarding Race & Schooling by The Colossus of Rhodey which takes the NEA to task for failing to understand “Brown” in the most basic sense, and instead wanting to mandate “color awareness” over “color blindness”.

My God, it really is just too easy to cleave such “research” and “arguments” in half. But what can one expect from those who once championed color-blindness but now color-consciousness … once championed individual rights but now group rights … and once championed dismantling barriers to desegregation but now favor race mandates based on some pseudo-scientific notion of “diversity”?

Second place for Council posts was Whose Freedom? What Is Speech? buy Right Wing Nut House which examines the current case of the 23 year old and Ukrainian immigrant that has felony charges pending against him for throwing a Koran into a toilet and defecating on it. That’s pretty gross, but a felony hate crime? Stick a crucifix in a jar of urine and call it art, paint a portrait of Mary, mother of Jesus with elephant dung and call it art, but you damn sure better not EVER insult the Koran . . . Anyone else here feel like the 1st Amendment is smarting from the pummeling just a wee bit?

The crucifix in urine is but one example of the outrageous anti-Christian “art” that has been shown over the last decade or so. What was the “intent” of the artist in creating such a display? Nothing less than to knowingly inflict emotional pain on those who believe in Christ as God. Artistic expression is rightly protected under the first amendment. But if we are going to use the standard of a Koran in the toilet provoking the exact same reaction among Muslims as the crucifix in urine did to Christians, why does one form of expression get a pass and the other doesn’t?

Isn’t this what the first amendment was created to protect? It doesn’t matter that your idea of free speech is different than mine. The first amendment guarantee is that all speech (with very limited exceptions) – yours, mine, and Mr. Shmulevich – is protected regardless of its affect on others.

Or it was anyway. Now we have “hate crime” statutes where we ask prosecutors, judges, and juries to play at being psychic in order to reach into the mind of defendants and glean their “intent” in committing an act.

I think that this case once again illustrates that the “hate crime” designation is ridiculous. A crime is a crime, regardless of the intent of the perpetrator. “Oh yeah, I stole and soiled that guy’s holy book, but I was actually feeling pretty good about him at the time.” “I hated his religion, so I stole his book and peed on it — so sue me!” Can anyone actually believe that those two instances would not be the same? Both are crimes — a book is “stolen”, but the desecration part . . . destruction of private property, maybe. As Rick asks in his post, “Does one have a right not to be offended in America?” Gettin’ pretty scary around here sometimes.

I managed to pick the number two entry correctly, however I had chosen Miracle On Sand by Big Lizards for the winner. Maybe I was just feeling more like celebrating with the Iraqis over their Asian Cup soccer win than getting down in the political dregs this week.

For the non-Council entries, the number one award goes to Michael J. Totten’s Baghdad Raid Night. Totten is embedded with an 82nd Airborne company and provides us with a harrowing nighttime experience.

“I suppose I shouldn’t smoke,” I said to Eddy.

“You got that right,” Eddy said. “Snipers wearing night vision can see the tip of your cigarette from a mile away. They’ll watch as you lift the cigarette to your mouth and figure out where your head is. Then BLAMMO. They’re really good shots.”

I kept the cigarettes in my pocket.

“We’re being followed,” said Sergeant Fisher.

Eddy, the rest of the soldiers, and I turned around.

“Four of ‘em,” Eddy said.

I couldn’t see anyone but the soldiers standing right next to me without night vision goggles.

“Where are they?” I said.

“In the shadows two blocks behind us,” Eddy said. “There weren’t there a minute ago.”

Gotta go and read that one now, huh? Second place in non-Council consideration was Build a Better World By Destroying Wealth! by Classical Values, which unloads on trial lawyers and other forms of professional vermin that suck the life out of the economy without giving anything back.

It’s all too easy to generalize and say that all lawyers make the world a worse place economically. They don’t. But a lot of them do. And there but for the grace of God went I.

This was partly in response to the threat of endless upcoming “Climate Change” litigation that some see right around the corner and which I wrote about in Climate Change Bullies — The Left Attacks!, which was also my entry this week — alas, no one was convinced to vote for it even for 2nd place. [Addendum: I gotta stop drinkin' before noon! That's a joke people!!! Anyway, my entry was about the Iraqi soccer team win and the Lefty bias that the LA Times displayed in their coverage thereof. Knew that I shoulda picked the Global Warming post.] Ah well, always next week. I was however with the majority for selection of the non-Council first place post, with What Problem? by The QandO Blog which I selected for second — it came in as a tie for a distant sixth.

If you would like to participate in this word party next week, take advantage of the Watcher’s offer of link whorage. As always, thanks Watcher, for some great reading!

Sphere It
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  • Titan Mk6B

    I believe it is time to go buy a koran. What I will do does not involve reading it though. Gettin’ sick of this shit. Hello from Tulsa.

  • ‘Okie’

    Hey Titan, hello back at ya!

    I certainly understand your instincts but have to advise caution. As Hugh Hewitt writes on his blog today:

    We are not at war with Islam. Our enemies want us to be at war with Islam because that is how they see the battle, and they wish us to embrace their disfigured vision of the conflict. They want every Muslim to believe that America is on a crusade to destroy Islam. They want the peoples of Turkey, Pakistan, Jordan and Indonesia as well as of every other Muslin on the globe to believe America hates Islam and is bent on destroying it.

    I also know that there are many good reasons to fear the Islamification of the West, but do we really think that our society could, or would, support a sustained all out conflict with over one-billion Muslims?

    About all that we can do is fight the radicals where we can, and work like the dickens to keep strong in our faith, which will one day triumph. No guarantees that there won’t be many ultra-dark days between now and then — could be another Dark Ages for all we know. Shame, to waste all the combined human knowledge of the last few centuries, but that is what I fear happening the most.

    What we must do is fight the Dhimmification of America. Hopefully that can be accomplished with the 1st Amendment intact.