Rampant Official Insecurity

China's War on Words

Anything used to insult Xi Jinping, banned

Jamie Seidel
NZ Herald


China's new President-for-life doesn't like criticism.  Since claiming the eternal throne of an Emperor earlier this week, he's clamped down — hard — on any hint of dissent.  Censorship has always been a way of life under China's one party state, reports News.com.au.  But things have just ramped up to a whole new level.

Authoritarian Rule is Being Established.

Earlier this week the Communist Party Council announced (a day before it actually met) that the limit of two five-year presidential terms will be abolished and Xi Jinping's guiding philosophy would be written into the constitution.  Immediately, Beijing's censors set to work.  They've attacked the very words people would need to use to express discontent.

You Will Do as We Say

The Religious Narrow Mindedness of the Left

2015 will undoubtedly go down as the year the Left’s efforts to impose its absolutist ideology went well beyond targeting lecturers and graduation speakers invited to colleges.

In late spring, the University of California distributed a guide to forbidden classroom phrases, including “America is the land of opportunity” and “America is a melting pot,” to faculty at each of its 10 campuses. Later in the year, George Mason University professor Jagadish Shukla and 19 others went national with a letter to President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, demanding they criminally prosecute any company or organization that denies climate change.

Now, in 2016, we discover that even public officials directly responsible for the safety of millions—the police chief of Cologne, Germany, and the mayor of Philadelphia, for example—have been cowed into a stunning dereliction of duty by the apostles of political correctness.

Many on the Left will argue that prescience justifies their rigidly enforced opinions. Having twice elected a liberal black president, successfully promoted gay marriage, enabled women to serve in combat roles, and taken major steps toward legalizing marijuana—all in less than a decade—liberals like to see themselves as prodding a cautious public to go where it sooner or later will agreeably follow.

Yet a much stronger case can be made that the Left’s aggressive enforcement of its ideology stems, not from any victory-inspired confidence, but from the very opposite.

Letter From the UK (About Statist Brainwashing)

British Secularist Values Regime Will Suppress Christianity

Consistent, faithful Muslims attempted to take over some state schools in Birmingham.  It was an infiltration plot, dubbed Trojan Horse, whereby school boards would be populated by faithful Muslims, who would then employ consistent Muslim teachers.  The curriculum and pedagogical methods (for example, classroom separation of boys and girls) would be adjusted to conform to true Islamic beliefs, teachings, and values.

The plot was exposed and the Trojan Horse was duly dragged outside the city walls whence it came.

The secularist, pagan British government decided that it had to police its schools more aggressively.  It had to clamp down, not on Islamic beliefs, but on "extremism".  How was "extremism" to be defined? you ask.  Anything taught in schools which did not conform to "British values".  And what, one asks, are British values?  Atheistic secularism, of course--similar to what is officially adhered to in Communist China.  

The upshot is that consistent, faithful Christian schools (and churches) are lumped in with consistent faithful Muslims--all alike are under the cosh because they teach values inconsistent with atheistic secularism.

Government Inspectors Could Monitor Sunday Schools And Choirs To Enforce ‘British Values’

Nick Hallett
Breitbart London

Government inspectors could monitor Sunday schools, church youth groups and even choirs to ensure they are teaching so-called “British values”, in a move Christians have dubbed “profoundly insulting”.

Lawful Christian Resistance, Part IV

God Is the Only Original Authority: 

All Other Authorities are Therefore Derived, Limited, and Subordinate

It is our contention that true, abiding liberty can only be achieved  and once achieved, sustained, within the Christian world-view.  All other frameworks or ideologies draw upon the creature, not the Creator.  Being of the creation, other ideologies end up oppressing and enslaving some, if not many.  Struggles for freedom in non-Christian states devolve into conflicts between elites striving to impose their respective truths upon the population at large.

Each non-Christian elite ends up defining some minority or other as outlaws--beyond the law--and persecutes them accordingly.  In today's "free societies", for example, the unborn child has been defined as the outlaw.  He has become an involuntary sacrifice to the glory of the secularist realm.  But there are other candidates for sacrifice and the longer secularism holds sway, the more citizens who have a different view and who march to the beat of a different Drummer, will be designated outlaws.  Remember that the communist tyranny of the Soviet Union  regarded itself as the most free realm on the earth.

The Christian Church has seen and experienced this before.

Imperial Power Meets the Human Soul

Stale and Crumbling

Empires are expensive entities. The bigger the Empire, the more the faces of the poor are ground into the dust. But as anthropologist Clifford Geertz pointed out, human culture is dense, rich, and exceedingly multi-layered. The problem with all imperial ambitions and achievements is that they can never encompass the richness and complexity of human ingenuity, creativity, or reason.

The intrinsic imperial instinct is to restrict, control, suppress, outlaw, forbid, and subdue.  But in every human heart lurks a nascent revolution against the arbitrary edict.  In every human heart lies a self-respect, an amour-propre, which sees right through the empty vanity of the emperor and his imperial edits.  The empire can only be maintained if it keeps control of everything--which is impossible.  Therefore, the more empires grow, the more impossible they are to maintain.  Generally, empires crumble and collapse from within, crushed under the millstone of their rules and ever burgeoning edicts and rules, on the one hand, and forever being undermined by the subtle complexities of subjects, on the other.

When dictators and emperors emerge, one option in dealing with them is to give them enough rope so they hang themselves.  The very complexity of human beings ensures that, given enough rope, it will inevitably happen.  Blame the wondrous complexity of the created human soul.  Nations and empires which eschew freedom and seek, instead, to command and rule by fiat over subjects, will inevitably collapse from the centre.  The very multi-layered complexity of human beings ensures it.

If one would like a modern example, take the latter-day Soviet Union, Mark II.

Sweden's Rabid Abortionism

Abortion Opponents Compared to Jihadists

The Observatory

 

February 2015: Mona Sahlin's, the national coordinator against violent extremism at the Swedish Ministry of Justice, stated during a panel discussion on religion and democracy that the midwife Ellinor Grimmark, a Christian who refuses to participate in abortion, was an "extreme religious practitioner who is fighting in a similar way as do the people fighting for the Islamic state.”

Source:
www.varldenidag.se/nyhet/2015/02/09/Sahlin-jamstallde-jihadister-med-abortmotstandare
www.citizengo.org/de/19049-christen-mit-gewissen-sind-keine-djihadisten

The Clone Wars

Militant Atheism

Secularism or atheism has a militant wing, much like Islamist militants sit out at the edges of Islamic nations.  Both alike claim that they are the true, genuine article.  Tolerant atheists and tolerant Islamic believers are accused respectively of being hypocritical compromisers. 

Our view is that the Islamist case for being consistently Islamic is a very strong one, given the plethora of sura in the Koran, the hadiths, and the historical practice of sharia law--all of which are intrinsic to Islam and the only authoritative standards for that religion.  In terms of orthodoxy and orthopraxy Islamism has the much stronger claim to being authentically Islamic. 

But what about secular atheism's militant wing?  Is intolerance and belligerence intrinsic to atheism?  To be sure, there are plenty of urbane, open-minded, mild atheists.  But do such speak consistently with the logical outworkings of atheism as claimed by its militant wing?  What is clear is that whenever atheism has insinuated into a culture to the point where it starts shaping the law and social institutions it always oppresses, persecutes and enslaves its opponents to one degree or other. 

By their fruits ye shall know them, we are told.  Peter Hitchens documents the fruits of secular atheism in the United Kingdom, as one typical case study:

Rising Authoritarianism

Shut Up, Shut Down, And Shut Out

One of the surest indications that an opponent is either pedalling a shonky argument or he is too incompetent to press his case intelligently is when he attacks the opponent (ad hominem) or attempts to silence him.  What has been dubbed the "new authoritarianism of the Left" has all the hallmarks.

We see it on every hand these days.  We will doubtless continue to see it.  The whole brouhaha resembles a dirty bomb: lots of heat, not much light, but plenty of poison.

The laziness of the Left over climate change is a case in point.  Not willing to face up to the debate, it sought to elude the argument by leap frogging it, declaring "the debate is over; the science is settled".  This casts  opponents as reactionary idiots--a modern type of flat-earthers, or geo-centric astronomers.  But anyone who knew even the barest basics of science, or the elementary principles of logic, or the primary hermeneutics of the scientific method knew instantly this was balderdash.  Feeding hypothetical projections into an electronic calculator to "prove" the reality of global warming has been the biggest instance of question-begging since Adam was a boy.