Life, Death, Obligation and Obfuscation

I am a strong advocate of productive value affirming behavior. I frequently have discussions with Objectivists and Extropians holding them accountable to their own professed highest value, that of their own life. Most professed life loving secularists are content to sit idly by while they age, wither, and eventually die. They deride cryogenic preservation, life extension technologies, and often justify their attitudes with appeals to wildly dystopian futures sprung right from the caves of revelations.

Often, *death* itself, is cited as a source of value, e.g. Death gives life meaning, death is the end to a beginning, death is the closing of the story, death lets us have our chance and clear the way for later life, death is an escape from suffering and living, etc. Death is none of these things, it is the cessation of all existence, it is the end of all values. Dying is not selfish as it is the complete destruction of the self.

These people who attach a value to death are what I tend to call “religious deathists” and just as many secularists share this view as do professed religionists. But when man’s productive and inventive forces are fully unleashed, death from aging and disease will likely be completely conquered. These religious deathists will still cling to their views and will grow old and die, but their children will be raised in a society which accepts indefinite life spans. The ones who had the integrity, rationality, and proper internal conviction will live to be the first generation enjoying indefinite life spans. It is hard to guess when this will happen, it could be this generation or the next or 10 generations down the line. But we can all help to bring this about faster.

To those objectivists out there, who profess to hold their own life as their highest value, why are you not acting in accordance with your values? You should be acting rationally and productively to fight your worst enemy, which will kill you, your loved ones, and end everything and everyone you care about. Most people balk at this call to arms, as it demands unwavering integrity and complete adherence to your fundamental convictions… evasion is much easier. Escapism is simpler. Blank out to get through the rough times. Objectivists, who profess that all the great advances of humanity sprung forth from the minds of individuals, that profess that a man of rationality with conviction and integrity is a virtually unstoppable creative and inventive force, that profess that one man even if the face of the greatest and most overwhelming odds can accomplish the most monumental feats… are the first to bow down, give up, apologize for their own existence, and excuse themselves from ever needing to do anything productive to fight aging, disease, and death.

Now no one is demanding that we drop everything we are doing and make studying senescence the only thing we live, breathe, and think, but first and foremost we all need to drop the philosophical acceptance of death; all else fallows naturally. Death is not OK, it never is, never has been, and never will be. It is not an escape or a relief, we are not ‘resting’ or in ‘a better place’ this is all hogwash people adopt in order to not have to come to fully face the inevitability of their own demise. But just like a drunkard who convinces himself that it’s just who he is and thus absolves himself of the responsibility of ever trying to change himself, the religious escapist completely absolve themselves of the compulsion and obligation to their own deepest values to ever do anything about death, and it is why this world of 3 billion profoundly intelligent beings can not muster up enough motivation or dedication to defeat even a modicum of the diseases which kill them.

It would be great if all people, everywhere, identified their most fundamental values and started acting in rational accordance with them. If all people everywhere (who were not just merely struggling to survive under whatever murderous brute happens to rule them) turned off the TV, the video games, the fashion and gossip mags and their IPODs, and started studying, learning, and thinking. If all people begin to actualize their potential, to at first believe they are capable of great things, and then realize they in fact were able, with dedication and perseverance to actually achieve many of these great things. But in lieu of that, first and foremost discard your philosophical acceptance of death. It is not OK. Secondly, take a look at any of the numerous charities dedicated to bringing about this world, and think about dedicating even just your idle CPU cycles to the Protein Folding at home project, or even better some time or money to any of the various organizations dedicated to saving your life and the life of everyone you love.

Donating Idle CPU Cycles
full list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects

Protein folding @ home - http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/

Proteins are biology's workhorses...The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery. Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

Orbit@Home - http://orbit.psi.edu/
is a project which uses the Orbit Reconstruction, Simulation and Analysis framework to monitor the impact hazard posed by Near-Earth objects

SETI@home - http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data

Fight AIDS @ Home - http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu/index.html
captures the otherwise wasted cycles of your computer and applies them to model the evolution of drug resistance and to design drugs necessary to fight AIDS

United Devices Cancer Research Project - http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/
The United Devices Cancer Research Project is asking you to volunteer your PC to help process molecular research being conducted by the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford in England and the National Foundation for Cancer Research

Charities / Institutions

Lifeboat Foundation www.lifeboat.com

- Future Studies -
Foundation for the Future http://www.futurefoundation.org/

Foresight Institute http://www.foresight.org

- Life Extension -
Methuselah Mouse Prize http://www.mprize.org
Immortality Institute http://www.imminst.org

- Intelligence Increase -
Singularity Institute http://www.singinst.org

- Other -
WTA http://transhumanism.org
Extropy Institute http://extropy.org
TV 2005 Scholarship Fund http://www.transhumanismo.org/tv05/registration.htm

- Social Sciences -
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology http://CRNano.org/support.htm
Grameen Foundation USA http://www.gfusa.org/microcredit.html

- Your Rights Online -
Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/support/
Electronic Frontier Foundation http://www.eff.org

- Space Migration -
Advocacy
National Space Society http://www.nss.org
Planetary Society http://www.planetary.org/home/

Mars Society http://chapters.marssociety.org/

Saturn V Restoration http://www.saturnrestoration.org/donate/index.html

Prizes
Elevator 2010 http://www.elevator2010.org/site/donate.html
X-Prize Foundation http://www.xprize.org

The Week and I on dogs, security, and emotions
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog&pop=1&indicate=1


One of my favorite news magazines is “the Week” which does a great job of presenting many sides of issues rationally and objectively, I have a real hard time finding any bias in it. I highly recommend this publication. Here are some notes from a recent issue.

From “The Week” March 10 2006

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Americans spent $14.3 Billion on dog food in 2004. That’s $10 billion more than we spent on baby food - The Washington post
**

I am beginning to believe that the ratio of dogs to babies is a clear sign of the downfall of a population. What city in the US tops the list? … San Francisco has more than four times as many dogs as children under 5. Do people eventually crave the unconditional affection of a semi-consciousness being that much? Is it any surprise that a city with the highest population of frustrated tyrants and wannabe social engineers desires as many of their own test subjects as possible to lead around? There are so many dogs in San Francisco that the city is contemplating collecting Dog waste in order to generate power. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11488372/ You can take your dog to a clothing pet store on Gough Street called, tellingly enough Babies http://www.yelp.com/biz/-pW80fX6y76e1CcrpwRoPA Says one patron “"I absolutely love this store but not as much as my dog Arkus Barkus probably does. We just bought him the coolest sweater and more toys.” San Francisco dog owners are not owners any more, but Guardians, according to it’s Dog Court http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2005-02-16/news/feature_full.html Whats next, a doggy bill of rights?

What changes are bred in a population that leads them to value pets over children? With some 2/3rds of American house holds owning pets and few and fewer having children, one has to ask what the consequences of these trends will be. When a society as a whole starts to value getting a pet over having children (ok, im biased being a cat lover, but hey, at leasts cats are semi independent and not inept retarded parasites like most dogs) Who will be the productive beings of new generations creating the new technologies and making the new discoveries to lead man into space and beyond? It won’t be Arkus Barkus, that’s for sure…

**
Loving County in west Texas is the emptiest county in the United States, with only 71 people, two roads, and on café spread among its 645 square miles. Still, it recently received $30,000 in anti-terrorism funds from the Department of Homeland Security - The New York Times
**

Great, what a wonderfully efficient use of funds, I believe Bin Laden specifically mentioned Loving County as a target in one of his audio tapes.

**
On Booting Summers out of Harvard
“The truth is far shabbier,” said Peter Beinart in The New Republic. The faculty forced summers out “because he wanted them to care about something beyond themselves.” Even among academics, tenured Harvard Ph.D.s lead an absurdly pampered life. They teach an average of only 28 weeks a year. Their courses and publications are built around “obscure micro topics” of interest to themselves and maybe a few dozen people in the world. Summers had the audacity “to ask various departments to explain why their research mattered,” and to argue that undergraduates deserved a better education for their $41,000 a year. By all accounts, the students loved him for advocating their interests; according to a Harvard Crimson survey, they felt he should stay by a 3-to-1 ratio. Summers is gone for one reason: He asked Harvard “to serve the nation, not merely itself” In academia today, that’s apparently too much to ask.
**

Peter Bienart is one of my favorite liberal writers, up their with Christopher Hitchens, he is the editor of The New Republic, and is usually extremely rational and principled, as his comments on the ousting of Harvard’s president demonstrate.

**
Stop thinking so hard
When it comes to big life decisions, it’s best to think with your gut. A new study has found that thinking too hard and too long, in fact, leads to decisions you’ll later regret. Researches at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands asked 80 people to think over major life choices, such as the purchase of a house or car, or a move to a faraway town. Half of the participants were then given a series of puzzles and brainteasers to distract them before they gave an answer. With little time to agonize, these people made snap decisions – and ended up being more satisfied in the end. People who deliberated carefully – delving deeply into the data and drawing up lists of pros and cons – ended unhappy with their choices. The results indicate that complex problems are better sorted in our unconscious minds, which have an instinctive wisdom in weighing multiple factors. “At some point in our evolution, we started to make our decisions consciously,” Ap Dijksterhuis tells New Scientist. “And we’re not very good at it. We should learn to let our unconscious handle the complicated things”
**

Whew, where to begin on this one. First off the description of this experiment begs further investigation, but presuming the conditions of the experiment were up to par and it was all handled very scientifically, then as an admirer of Rand I have to recognize how much this study coincides with a lot of what she said about *what* exactly our emotions are. If they are the logical extensions of our deepest convictions, it’s clear why this works. There is no ‘instinct’ or mystical gut reaction involved. The brain is a complex distributive network pattern recognition system and will recognize and react to things without the hindrance of the conscious mind recognizing it. Over analyzing a difficult choice could move you farther and farther away from those reflexive long ingrained reactions to scenarios. But embellishing a gut feeling when you do not base your emotions on rational goals or values is more dangerous, since your intuition will lead you down whatever random whim happens to catch your fancy. One wonders how these people can conduct decent scientific experiments when they toss around things like “instinctive wisdom” but I’ll have to chalk this up as empirical edification of Rand’s assessment of our emotions.

This weekend I saw a performance of the musical Chicago at the university my friend is attending. I had not yet seen this story on stage or in film, and was not overly familiar with it beyond having to do with some dancers and murder. The performance I saw was very enjoyable as far as productions by college students go, and a good friend of mine had a major role in it. Overall the cast did a good job on the show. But the story itself is terrible; philosophically. In fact it should be renamed to “How to get away with killing your husband by promulgating moral relativism”

The Author and Philosopher Ayn Rand, whom I am a great admirer of, wrote often about how art should serve as a philosophical ideal, representing the way things ought to be in order to inspire us and provide ‘spiritual fuel’ as she said. Most art serves both as a reflection of predominant cultural philosophical trends and a driving force behind those cultural ideas, unfortunately the philosophical ideals being promulgated by much of the art we experience today is very unhealthy when held up to any standard with life as it’s core.

Everybody forms their ideas about philosophy, including ethics and their purpose in the world, primarily through the people, movies, music, and art that surrounds them. Of course some develop those ideas through deep introspection, but these are the exception that make an active effort to study philosophy. The ideas I chastise in Chicago are present all over the place in media and in the saying and phrases people repeat to themselves in order to get by. I don’t know whether the writers of Chicago, which came to Broadway in 1975, really embraced this ethical ambiguity and were trying to promulgate those ideas or were merely reflecting predominate ethical trends, but the philosophical ‘crime’ remains the same. They are either aiding and abetting or are an active participant in the undermining of any rational philosophical basis for ethics, advocating worldviews which lead to a lot of pain and suffering.

With that, let me give a refresher to those who may not have seen this show in a while and an overview to those who have not seen it at all. The show starts out with Roxy cheating on her husband. The man she is cheating on her husband with is ready to walk out right after they finish doing the deed and Roxy, insulted by this, shoots and kills him. She convinces her husband that the man was a burgler, but during questioning by police she confesses to the nature of the crime. She is carted off to a jail where women who are charged with murder reside.

At this prison we are given a song by these women accused of murder called “he had it coming” where each proceeds to not only admit that she murdered her husband / significant other (in one case murdered him and the person he was having an affair with) but to essentially (as the song title shows) blame it on the victims. The theme of the song was satirical and had the audience laughing. I sat stunned, what if we had a prison of accused rapists who were singing a song called “she had it coming” How would they react to that? Or a group of Homophobes singing about how their gay victims were asking for it (this was the same school and cast which performed the Laramie project a few months earlier, where the perpetrators of the murder of Matthew Shepherd claimed just that) The audience would have been, rightly so, absolutely horrified, but when it is women talking about murdering their cheating boyfriends and husbands, it’s funny?

We are then treated with a song by a reporter insisting that there is a little bid of good in all of us. It’s a nice thought, superficially, that even in the worst person there is some good. But to say something like that means you must be holding actions up against a standard of good and bad, or right and wrong, in the first place. When we look at actions, like murder or rape, and compare it against the norm and find it to be bad, surely we must recognize the degree or the severity of the infraction. Stealing something is bad, but it is not as wrong as killing someone. Likewise morally virtuous actions must have a caliber associated with them. Slowing down in traffic to let someone merge is a decent thing to do when necessary, but how virtuous is it compared to staying true to your deepest ideals in the face of overwhelming opposition? So while Stalin may have been nice to his puppy, the fact that he had millions of people murdered can never be overshadowed no matter how many ‘good’ things he has done. While some of his actions might have been good, because of how many evils he had committed there is no way one could assert he has some good in him. Maybe if Stalin could live in a labor camp for a few million years he might be forgiven, but until then it corrupts the notion of good and bad to assert he had some good in him.

Additionally, such a statement undermines the very concept of good and bad, even though it purports to be based on it. If you accept without condition that everyone has some good in them it means that no matter how many horrible things they do, they are never completely vile. Conversely, it means that no matter how hard someone tries, he can never be good. This is because every statement automatically implies it’s corollary, and if one asserts that even in the worst of us lies some good, they are also asserting that even in the best of us lies some evil. So even though you are using good and bad to judge actions, no person can be good or bad. We hear this ethical abduction all the time in many forms, most commonly as “well, nobody’s perfect” with it’s implicit statement ‘so I won’t try to correct my faults’ left unsaid. Why even try? When no matter how hard you try you are destined to fail. This saying and idea is nothing less than one of the remnants of original sin in the secular west.

We are then treated to a duet by one of the inmates, admittedly guilty, and the prison warden about how there seems to be no class or ethics in society today. The talk about theft and bad manners, but conveniently avoid the topic of murder. Everyone tells me this was intended to be hypocritical, but the prison warden was no murderer and was part of the duet, so that interpretation is disingenuous.

The one woman who was innocent was found guilty and hung because she refused to lie, to admit to a crime she didn’t commit, and blame it on the victim. The two female leads, who both wantonly and callously murdered their significant others, got off through a series of lies and appeals to the jury. In the end they were freed and went on a road show together, and the play closes with the narrator saying “That’s America”

America is where the guilty get away with murdering their husbands by blaming it on the victim through legal maneuvering and the innocent hang for crimes they did not commit? Only in the eyes of the artistic intelligentsia of 1975 New York.

The Rape of Nanking

I just recently completed Iris Chang’s book ‘The Rape of Nanking’ This alarming title does not do justice to the true horrors of this event, and no collected works ever could. Iris first heard stories about Nanking when she was growing up, her parents told terrible stories of horrific events full of torture, rape, and murder. When she started going to school she tried to look up this historically tragic event and was unable to find any information on, which was not surprising due to the west’s active ignorance of the subject. She wrote the stories off as racist tales. Many years later her interest in the subject would be sparked again, and her book ended up bringing many aspects of this tragedy to a much more fulfilling public recognition of the event.

Often referred to as the Sino-Japanese war, the very notion that Japan and China were once at war still surprises most western educated people. After the turn of the century Japan acquired a revitalized focus on nationalism and a form of shintoism that focused on the emperor, insisting he was a descendant of god. Over the next few years Japan became and strongly militaristic society, and combined with it’s nationalism and ethnocentrism, it was a recipe for terror. Seeking to take their rightful place in the world and spread out in the face of limited resources; Japan embarked on the invasion of Manchuria.

Toward the end of 1938 a war raged between Japan and the Chinese Nationalists led by Chaing Kai Sheck. The nationalist’s capital city was Nanking, a city of over a million people. As the Japanese troops marched ever closer to the city a strong defense was prepared and up to half the population fled. The Japanese dropped leaflets insisting that order and peace would be restored rapidly and that Chinese civilians would be treated with compassion. For various reasons, some still confusing, the defense of Nanking was not a strong one and the city fell after only few days. In the time leading up to the fall of Nanking, a group of foreign diplomats and missionaries, led by John Rabe, a Nazi, created a safety zone in the middle of the city, insisting that any Chinese inside it would be safe. Amazingly Rabe pressured the Japanese to loosely respect the conditions and it is estimated that of the 600,000 civilians and soldiers that did not flee the city up to 250,000 of them made it to the safety zones.

To state that the remaining people were not so lucky is the understatement of the century. As the Japanese soldiers marched into the cities they killed virtually every civilian they laid eyes on, and raped and then murdered virtually every woman they saw. These were not isolated incidences of violence perpetrated outside of the chain of command, but were in fact standard operating procedure. The Japanese soldiers lined up surrendered Chinese soldiers by the thousands and murdered them. Japanese newspapers of the time reported accounts of decapitation contests among Japanese officers, with officers toping 200 murders by decapitation. Others were used as live bayonet practice, burned alive, tortured to death, had their throats slit, the list of horrors goes on.

The female civilians of Nanking suffered unimaginable brutality, nearly every single woman in the city who was not in the safety zone (and even some of them) was raped, from girls as young as eight to elderly women. Any resistance would be met by immediate death, often extremely painful deaths which typically included being impaled in the groin with bamboo poles. Even without resistance, most of the time the women were murdered after being raped, usually shot in the back or bayoneted. Many women were taken as sex slaves and permanently attached to beds or chairs were they were repeatedly raped, day and night. Some were literally raped to death, hemorrhaging and bleeding to death from the attacks.

No one was spared the brutality, young, old, sick, man or woman. It is estimated that virtually *every single* person who did not make it into the safety zone was murdered, and the terror dragged on for 7 weeks.

There is a tendency to hear such stories and think that these are mere exaggerations of enemy events during war, but all the evidence suggests otherwise. The Japanese soldiers often documented their mass murders and burials, many letters from Japanese soldiers in the city corroborate the stories, and in some cases a significant amount of photos and footage were available as evidence, some showing the mass graves containing thousands upon thousands of bodies. Stories were reported in Japanese newspapers with photos. Documents from high in the Japanese military also corroborate, the evidence is overwhelming and distressing.

The Nazi John Rabe smuggled a film detailing the atrocities back to Germany to show the furor himself. He was later visited by the secret police and ordered to stop speaking on Japanese atrocities. John Rabe was the leading force credited with saving more than 250,000 lives in Nanking. Imagine that, a Nazi saving 250,000 lives. Families in the safety zone named their children after him, he was the hero of the city. In the process of writing this book Iris Change decided to follow up on John Rabe’s life, she ended up getting in touch with family members. They told her that Rabe for many years had tried to be absolved of Nazi ties and it was his actions in Nanking which finally won the new allied government officials over. During those intervening years his family ended up poor and on the verge of starvation, when word of this reached back to Nanking a tremendous outpouring of food and provisions came flooding into Rabe as most of the people in the city new exactly who he was and what he did. Iris Chang also found a family member who had Rabe’s detailed journals and brought them to publication.

Today the Japanese government still sidesteps accusations that anything out of the ordinary happened there. The few Japanese brave enough to speak up about the atrocities are viciously threatened by right wingers, with one recent case resulting in a public figure getting shot multiple times.

It could be argued that the sad and horrific events of Nanking still claim lives to this day, as I recently found out that shortly after this book was published Iris Chang, a intelligent and passionate woman, a wife and mother, and accomplished author, committed suicide. She seems to have had the seeds of paranoid schizophrenia in her which were activated by researching this event, which it seems she ended up believing was actively covered up by the Japanese government, the Soviet government, and the US in order to facilitate the creation of a stable Japan in the face of the looming threat of the Soviet Union. Her dual suicide notes offer sad evidence of the torment this caused in her and are a testament to the duality of her paranoia.

How could men be brought to do such things? The looming feeling from these hundreds of thousands of tragic stories, and other similar events like those in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia beg the question, is the veil of civility really that thin? Is it that disturbingly easily to convince good normal men to kill, brutally, repeatedly, and violently? The implications of this fill me with apprehension. What would I have been like if I were raised by the militarized nationalistic Japanese army? Indoctrinated with the idea from birth that the Chinese are nothing more than dogs, that they are not people, and beaten if I spoke in protest? We all like to thing we are enlightened and would truly raise ourselves above such irrationality, but how many of our thoughts actually are original? How many of us question all the societal habits promulgated and swallowed up without second thought? It is distressing, however one must remember that the veil of civility is not yet that thin, as it took nearly a generation of indoctrination for the Japanese of WWII to be such ruthless and cold blooded killers and rapists. Indeed, the question is off base, as such a person would clearly NOT BE me. The me of today transplanted to their would never fall for it and would rather be killed than to commit such acts, and the me as a child transplanted there would not be me at all by the time he grew up, but a killer robot programmed by the Japanese government, as all good soldiers were.

Michael

Link - http://www.matus1976.com/politics/nanking_1.htm

www.Matus1976.com
Philosophy, Science, Politics, 3D Animation, Motorcycles

3D Animation - http://www.matus1976.com/3d/3d_index.htm
Akira Bike Project - http://www.matus1976.com/akira_bike/welcome.htm
Eudaemonists - http://www.matus1976.com/eudaemonists/
Politics - http://www.matus1976.com/politics/index_politics.htm

Are you Proud of your race?

In a forum I frequent a poster stated that she was proud of her race. I would ask why are you proud of your race? Now it is important to emphasize the correct word here, I am not asking why she is proud of *her* race, or proud of her *race*, but why she is *proud* of her race. One should not attach any special significance to their race because that, in itself, is a form of racism.

Consider the negation; you are ashamed of your race. Everyone immediately recognizes why that is wrong. Being ashamed of something implies that it is wrong and you have erred in some manner. How can you err in your race? You have no choice over it. If it is wrong to be ashamed of your race then it must necessarily be wrong to be the opposite, proud. The fact is, implying you are proud or ashamed of your race corrupts the very notion of pride and shame. Pride and shame direct our actions. You can not be proud or ashamed of things you have had no choice in.

She later gives the example of a fat women being proud of her weight? Why? What is good about being fat? Coming from someone who struggles with his weight, it is unhealthy and makes you more likely to die in any number of ways, including significantly increasing your risk of cancer. What is there to be proud of? Perhaps if they tried really hard to be fat and it was her goal, they can be proud of it. If not, and this is what her statement really implies, than you can be proud of anything you want for whatever reason, which again undermines the very idea of pride.

You should only be proud of things that are good. Consider the modern ghetto culture of America, or the Yobs of Europe, which derive value and pride from intimidation and violence. Are these proper things to be proud of? They do not bother concerning themselves with why something should make you proud, you simply must be proud or you are inferior. So people become proud of whatever they want, it is a form of value hedonism; a wanton embellishment of whatever arbitrary whim happens to catch ones fancy. It means a person’s self esteem and is based on nothing specific and is blown about in the wind by the slightest breeze.

Being proud of a race, class, or family heritage is nothing more than an attempt to gain value through the hard work of other people. Being proud of the great accomplishments of the Chinese as a group because you are Chinese means you think you are better because other people that are like you in some particular arbitrary manner accomplished something more than what you have accomplished, so you get to feel good about yourself. Being proud of your race is just as wrong as disliking someone else because of their race, both are based on the same misconceptions, group think, and arbitrary valuation of attributes people have no control over. The truth is the only just way to judge yourself is through your own actions, and the consequences of your actions are the only things you should be proud, or ashamed of.

One of my best friends is Greek, and he jokes about all the great things the Greeks accomplished. They sure accomplished a great deal; about 2,000 years ago. But he jokingly implied that this somehow makes him special. Is he proud to be Greek? He didn’t accomplish any of those things. Yet many modern Greeks try to 2nd hand a lot of value from the accomplishments of all other Greeks to such an extent that native Greeks exhibit a form of ancestor worship hardly paralleled in any other culture. It is all just a form of group think and it is all an attempt to steal and create false value and a false sense of self worth.

If you can be proud of your race can I feel bad for you because of your race? Gee, it’s too bad you are Chinese, or Vietnamese or black. I feel sorry for you, because group XXX hasn’t accomplished much, and therefore you will not accomplish much. All of these attitudes absolutely destroy the concept and the value of the individual. Or, to put it another way, if you can be proud of your race, are you ashamed of it for its atrocities? Are Germans ashamed of the Holocaust and feel guilt because of it? Japanese ashamed of who they are because of the Rape of Nan King, Whites for the conquest of the New World, Vietnamese for putting Pol Pot into power? No one should ever suffer from un earned guilt, and conversely, revel in un earned pride. Being proud of something that is completely arbitrary corrupts the notion of pride. Try to define the concept of pride and you will see what I mean.

Let us take a look at Aristotle’s definition, from Nichomachaen ethics. “With regard to honour and dishonour the mean is proper pride, the excess is known as a sort of 'empty vanity', and the deficiency is undue humility;” and further “A proper sense of oneself is based on a reverent love for the truth” Being proud of your race is an empty vanity just as being ashamed of it is an undue humility. Your race has no moral value, it is a non moral attribute.

In the future we will be able to choose our height, weight, eye color and skin color as easily as we choose our hair color now. What will we derive our value from then? When any *person* can choose to be man or woman (or both) and choose to be any *race* (as if were even a real concept in the first place) what will they then base their sense of self on? They are going to have to derive their value the good old fashioned way, through what they have accomplished and the kind of person they are and have chosen to be.

Furthermore, by crying about discrimination against Asian Americans she was actually being racist. What is an Asian American? Well it’s an individual one is lumping into a group to be judge as a group and to have political interests as a group, instead of as an individual. It is discrimination in general, in all forms that must be fought. Not just against Asian Americans or Black Americans or Sweedish Americans, but against the concept of pre-judging someone based on an un-chosen attribute. Violence against individuals that should be adamantly opposed, not violence against groups.

Consider other alternative groups you can be proud of, and the absurdity becomes obvious. Am I proud of my blue eyes? A lot of blue eyed people have accomplished a great many things. I should be proud of the heritage of the blue eyes. Am I proud of my brown hair, well us brown hairs have also accomplished a great many things.

You have to be proud of things for a reason, not just simply because they are a part of you. You need to learn to think of yourself as an individual, not a foggy conception of a group. Being proud of your race is a form of racism, as racism is defined by judging someone or attributing something to them merely because of their race. You are not a race or a gender, and if you use either as your primary identifier of yourself then you are not an individual but a foggy conglomeration of a lot of other individuals.

Michael

This post was written to VietPundit, a Vietnamese American who writes a popular blog. Someone accused him of being a 'chickenhawk' and this was my response to him.

Vietpundit,

First let me thank you sincerely for taking the time to create and maintain this blog, America is severely lacking in voices which tell a more accurate story of the Vietnam War. As an <30 year old American, I was not around during that war, but I have done my best to try to educate people on the vicious aftermath of the war and deride the hypocrisy of the anti war protestors who could not give a shit about the people of Vietnam, as evident from their complete and total evasion of everything that happened there, and in Laos, and in Cambodia. It is disgusting.

As for being a ‘chickenhawk’, don't consider yourself one, or even consider the term a valid criticism. As other posters have pointed out, one can certainly have beliefs yet not drop absolutely everything they are doing and follow those convictions whole heartedly, if that were the case you would not be allowed to have opinions on anything except the one thing you devote your life to. Besides, if you are a productive hard working American, and you voted for an administration that seeks to spread liberal democracy and freedom, then you are putting actions to your values. I think in your fight for freedom you have all ready been through enough anyway, far more than any of these ‘chickenhawk’ crying coffee shop Marxist warrior bums could ever imagine, so tell them they can go to hell.

I consider the ‘chickenhawk’ argument is fallacious for the following reasons

1) It asserts that someone must do absolutely everything to follow a conviction, e.g. if you support the war you should be fighting it (as opposed to preferring to see more freedom in the world than less) But I also support freedom for the people of Iran, Syria, Cuba, Vietnam, Burma, Laos, China, etc, etc, etc. Must I take up arms against everyone of these brutal dictatorial governments? No. Yet the anti war activists are the ones that are opposing, every step of the way, any effort to remove these murderers from power. I am also pro choice and support gay rights, but that does not mean I am required to partake in marches and parades, nor invade countries that brutally supress such things. Interestingly most people who support these things are the ones that would call you a chicken hawk and who themselves would do nothing to stop the worst of the oppression of gays and women; that in fundamentalist ruled Islamic countries. Which leads me to point 2

2) Those making the claim that we must draw out every belief to it’s full logical conclusion and act on it wholly themselves do not abide by it. If they oppose the Iraq war, then continuing to work and be a productive American is contributing to the spread of an imperialistic murderous bush tyranny (according to them). Yet I do not see them pulling any Ted Kaczyisnkis and living off the grid and no longer contributing productively to the perpetuation of a government they see as murderous. So by asserting you are a chickenhawk they are also acknowledging that they are hypocrites.

3) it ignores the concept of division of labor. War is a dirty and nasty thing, often bloody and painful. So is being an Emergency Medical Technician or a Doctor or a Police Officer (as you point out) yet they are perfectly content paying other people to do that dirty work for them. They believe they have the right to be free from aggression and are perfectly content in paying other people to enforce that right. Similarly we believe all people of the world should be free and some are perfectly content in paying other people to bring that about.

The main point is that all of us make compromises in our lives between the world we want to see and the world we want to live, the supporters of the war and the opposers of it. The chickenhawk argument is basically asserting that no compromises can be made, but that means they themselves also can not make those compromises.

Michael

April 30th, 2005 marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and the start of the brutal oppression of the 100 million people who have lived and are living in Vietnam. Even as an atheist and a libertarian I never the less applaud US President George W. Bush and his administration for demonstrating their resolve in the just cause of supporting freedom and liberal democracy in the world. I wish that the people of the United States had the same resolve 30 years ago. But 30 Years ago the people of America turned their backs on a just cause, confused and disheartened by sensationalized violence, bias reporting, and good intentions gone horribly awry. They cried for peace and for a stop to the killing. They thought we were the enemy to the people of Vietnam, and they thought that when we left, peace would come, and the killing would stop. But they were wrong, and the killing grew far worse. Tens of thousands would die in land reforms and murder quotas handed down by the leaders of the Vietnamese communists. Over a million people would flee the communist oppression and take to the sea, hoping for a better life somewhere else. Hundreds of thousands died at sea, some by pirates; some by the failure of make shift rafts, and some by foreign navies who prevented the refugees from landing, against UN agreements. The future the realists had so ominously predicted came to pass, and the domino theory proved true enough. After the dictatorial communists were finished imparting their brutal oppression on the people of South Vietnam, and with western opposition willingly derailed, they moved onto Laos, inflicting brutal revenge upon the valiant mountain people. They then moved their guns, bombs, and chains onto Cambodia and subsequently armed and brought to power the perpetrators of the worse genocide the world has ever seen. A democide the world had cried "never again" about and completely ignored, ignored again in Rwanda, and is ignoring again today in the Sudan. The North Vietnamese communist governments and its proxies killed 7.5 million people since 1975. In the four year period starting at the fall of Saigon, more people were killed in Indochina then Americans have been killed in all their wars combined. The western world is the freest, the richest and the most militarily powerful, yet most of it stands idly by while murderous regimes like that of Saddam Hussein, Kim John Il, and the communist party of Vietnam rack up bodies by the millions, while the west's populations justify their own inaction by appealing to moral relativism; a questionable philosophy steeped high in body counts. On April 30th of this year, thousands of people will be marching in Washington, they will be marching in honor of the millions of Indochinese people, to bring attention to the sad fate that befell them, and to remind us of what could have been. April 30th marks an astounding opportunity for the Bush administration and the American people to deal another blow against the tyranny of the world and start down the path of making amends to one of the greatest transgressions of the United States of its entire existence. That transgression was the wanton abandonment of the people of Indochina to murderous and brutally oppressive communism. Even today, the 80 million people of Vietnam live under one of the worst regimes on the planet, a regime which actively suppresses democracy and political dissent with swift and brutal violence. I implore everyone to grant these forgotten heroes and victims an audience, and to speak out against the continual inaction of the west in the face of these murderous regimes, and show some support for these forgotten victims. We can bring international attention to the plight of the people of Indochina, to the murderous hypocrisy of the peace activists and anti-war protestors, who since 1975 have been as silent as the 7.5 million murdered by the Vietnamese Communist government and it's proxy regime's, and to the consequences in lives of running from just causes when the going is rough at a time when that lesson is more important than ever. 57,000 Americans lost their lives defending the people of South Vietnam, and many thousands more were injured. But history has proven their cause just. How many more would have been killed continuing to defend the South? Likely none, since South Vietnam stood on its own for two years with no help, a modicum of material support would have likely been enough for them to defend against aggression, just like South Korea has for nearly 50 years. But we will never know, and 7.5 million people died because we did not continue to help defend the South. Every politician who supported the war, labeled as 'hawks' by the 'peace activists' warned of the dreadful blood bath that would ensue if we abandoned Indochina to the communists and sadly they proved to be correct. If there is a lesson to be learned from the Vietnam War that is applicable today, it is to not abandon a people in their darkest hour.

Visit www.april30.org for more information.

The figures I cite for death tolls are moderate estimates and based on the investigations done by Rudolph J Rummel, a retired political science professor from the University of Hawaii who has authored 24 books and was a runner up for a Nobel Peace prize. Mr. Rummel's book "Power Kills" is one of the most cited books in history. There is probably no man alive who knows more about how and why governments kill people, and their death tolls, than Mr. Rummel. Be sure to visit his web page at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/ Among tremendous information on Vietnam, R.J Rummel's site: Power Kills says…

"Perhaps of all countries, democide in Vietnam and by Vietnamese is most difficult to unravel and assess. It is mixed in with six wars spanning 43 years (the Indochina War, Vietnam War, Cambodian War, subsequent guerrilla war in Cambodia, guerrilla war in Laos, and Sino-Vietnamese War), one of them involving the United States; a near twenty-one year formal division of the country into two sovereign North and South parts; the full communization of the North; occupation of neighboring countries by both North and South; defeat, absorption, and communization of the South; and the massive flight by sea of Vietnamese. As best as I can determine, through all this close to 3,800,000 Vietnamese lost their lives from political violence, or near one out of every ten men, women, and children.1 Of these, about 1,250,000, or near a third of those killed, were murdered."And that 3,800,000 figure of course does not include the 3,000,000 in Cambodia.

Killed in Vietnam:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1B.GIF
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF

Between 1975 and 1987 the Vietnamese Communist government killed 2.5 million people (these are moderate estimates). The last US soldier had left Vietnam in March 1973. The war was over in April 1975. 500,000 people died at sea (10 times the number of American soldiers killed) The Vietnamese Communist government killed ANOTHER 1.5 million people in Cambodia and Laos in the same time period. That's 4.5 million dead, killed by Vietnam Communist government since 1975. The Khmere Rouge, a government put into power by Vietnamese Communist government and armed and supplied by them, would kill another 3 million people That's 7.5 million people since we left Vietnam. Not surprisingly this is not a statistic you hear very often.
Where were the peace activist when Hanoi rolled through Saigon? Where were they when it crushed Laos? Where were they when it brought the Khmere Rouge to power? Where were they when 500,000 vietnamese people died at sea? They were as silent as the 7.5 million people murdered by the government they helped bring to power.

- Matus1976