ShrinkWrapped

There'll Always Be An England?

There'll always be an England,
And England shall be free
If England means as much to you
As England means to me.

-- words & music: Parker & Charles

The first time I wondered in a post if There Will Always Be an England? was in May of 2006.  Things have not measurably improved since then, and in some ways the erosion of British freedom has accelerated.

Most Americans, present occupant of the White House excepted, treasure the special relationship with England that has evolved over the last 100 years.  We have fought together, bled together, and died together maintaining what is now quaintly referred to as "the Free World."  The portents are troubling and suggestive that England, the birthplace of our Democracy, has traveled so far down the path to soft despotism that their future is in question.  A terribly troubling article by Melanie Philips offers the first example:

PC Plod loses the plot

A quite devastating report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary has admitted that the British police have staged a 30 year ‘retreat from the streets’ and abandoned the public to endemic thuggery which has blighted the lives of millions of people.

This report, by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir Denis O’Connor, is a stunning admission of what can only be described as systemic professional collapse. The picture he paints is of a society whose most vulnerable inhabitants have been simply abandoned because the police have, as he bluntly observes, ‘defined disorder down’ -- and effectively out of existence -- as they have looked the other way.

The kind of yobbery he is talking about is, as he says,  

a cumulative, corrosive issue that undermines the ability of victims to live in peace.

Yet the police by and large don’t take it seriously. The principal reason is that anti-social behaviour does not fall into the category of ‘crime’ – and therefore does not register in the crime statistics. And since for years now the police have tailored what they do in order to be seen to be meeting crime statistics targets set by the government, the victimisation of whole communities by yobbery has gone unaddressed.

Not surprisingly, those most victimized by "yobbery", which essentially means thuggery (muggings, petty crime, burglary) are the poor, elderly, infirm, and disabled.  The causes are manifold:

The fact is that, over the past three decades or so, PC Plod has simply lost the plot. There have been many reasons for this: a denigration of policing street experience in favour of increasingly ideological academic qualifications as the criteria for promotion; the undermining of justice and morality by ‘victim culture’ and human rights law; the savaging of police attitudes by the politically correct inquisition; the politicisation of the upper ranks and their kow-towing to Whitehall interference and managerial gobbledegook.

Read the whole thing.  The second data point for the day comes courtesy of the Viking:

Three-year-olds being labelled bigots by teachers as 250,000 children accused of racism

Teachers are being forced to report children as young as three to the authorities for using alleged ‘racist’ language, it was claimed last night.

Munira Mirza, a senior advisor to London Mayor Boris Johnson, said schools were being made to spy on nursery age youngsters by the Race Relations Act 2000.

More than a quarter of a million children have been accused of racism since it became law, she said.

This is PC running out of control.  It is inimical to freedom and mere steps away from re-education camps. 

(It might pay to consider if there are efforts underway to institute another aspect of PC Thought Control on our children: U.S. Education Secretary Vows to Make American Children 'Good Environmental Citizens'.)

A third data point concerns the further erosion of speech rights in England:

Six arrested in Gateshead over 'Koran burning'

Officers detained two men on September 15 and four more yesterday and all six were bailed pending further inquiries, Northumbria Police said.

''The arrests followed the burning of what are believed to have been two Korans in Gateshead on September 11,'' the spokesman said.

''The incident was recorded and a video placed on the internet.''

In a video still accessible on YouTube, six young men in hooded tops or wearing scarves over their faces can be seen pouring petrol on a book and setting it alight, before burning another.

...

Northumbria Police said the men were not arrested for watching or distributing the video, but on suspicion of burning the Koran.

Lest we become too complacent, in America we have our own version of threats to Free Speech, even aside from the pressure brought to bear by government officials on Terry Jones:

Pastor behind Quran plan may face  $200,000 bill

TAMPA — The preacher from Gainesville who ignited a firestorm of criticism over his plan to torch 200 copies of the Quran says he wants to move his church to the Tampa Bay area by the end of the year, NBC affiliate WFLA reported.

He's also facing a $200,000 bill for policing costs during the firestorm his plan created, The Gainesville Sun newspaper said. However, officials say they're not sure they can force him to pay.

England has become a nation which has completely surrendered to Political Correctness.  There is no right to self defense, speech is severely circumscribed so as not to provoke protected victim groups, and the citizenry are no longer protected from society's predators.  The Wolves have been empowered, the Sheep terrified, and the Sheep Dogs emasculated.  The only remaining question is whether the process has gone so far that it is now irreversible.

England is a cautionary tale for America.  There are those who would like nothing less than to follow down the same path.  Here, too, there is a sense that we are fast approaching a point of flection, at which time we will either begin the arduous struggle to reverse course, or surrender to the Progressive erosion of our Freedoms. 

The Axis of Evil: Islamist Terror and PC-Thought

There is a split in the commentary on the Fort Hood killer.  Many of the Mainstream Media reports, as well as statements from official sources, emphasize how troubled the shooter was by his upcoming deployment.  Rather fanciful theories promulgated by non-Mental Health Professionals as well as by non-clinical Media Psychologists suggest he suffered from Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder; this is a nonsensical formulation but the kind of thing we have come to expect from media purveyors of psycho-babble.  It has a certain resonance for non professionals and (mis)uses words associated with Psychoanalysis to gain a pseudo-authenticity.  The goal of such obfuscatory commentary is to minimize the risk that the killers actions will in any way be associated with his religious beliefs.

On the other side of the divide are a host of Commentators who are outraged at the official response (more of a non-response) to the obvious.  Since few such commentators are in positions of influence on the MSM or the government, their outrage is relatively impotent.  And that may be a window into the psychology of the Politically Correct approach.

Under the PC administration, all utterances must be filtered by the thought police. It is at such times that humorists and satirists often get closest to the reality:

Placing Blame

This is what hacks me off about liberals. It's not their romanticizing socialism; though that's problem enough. But worse is their assumption that everyone outside their tribe is an idiot. Right now Obama and the tingle-leg media are spinning that a man who yelled 'Allahu akbar' before shooting was a victim of pre-traumatic stress disorder. Why? Well because they expect us Neanderthals to start killing brown people in retaliation.

Bill Bennett approaches the same point from a slightly different angle:

Why are chiefs of staff of the army saying things like: “I think we have to be very careful....Our diversity not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse,”?

You connect those dots and you will have your answer. I’m used to this kind of talk in a university—perhaps a university that outlaws ROTC. I’m surprised to find this kind of talk and attitude from on high at institutions ROTC trains under and for, namely one of the last “hard places” in America.

I well recall the 2006 Nickle Mines Amish School massacre of 6 children. And I recall Jay Nordlinger saying: “This is what we would have thought would have been one of the last safe places in America.”  He was wrong—we would have thought a place like Ft. Hood a safe place in America, safe from our own U.S. military hosting an officer-terrorist (that’s what we shall call him, an officer-terrorist). I also would have thought the Army would have been one of the last, or one of the first, hard places in America as defined by Michael Barone (“the part of American life subject to competition and accountability where the military trains under live fire—as opposed to a soft America that seeks to instill self-esteem. Hard America plays for keeps.”).

Well if we want to be safe, if we want to defeat the jihadist threat, we’d better reinforce hard America—and, sad to say, starting with our military leadership.

I have written in the past [PC & Defects in Reality Testing] that PC-thinking is a thought disorder which impairs the ability to recognize and effectively deal with reality.  The major purveyors of PC-thought, Academia, the MSM, liberal and Compassionate Conservatives, cowardly politicians of all stripes, adopt PC-thought as a way to diminish rational, protective aggression.

[This is a complicated construct.  Clearly the far left, from which PC arose, does not eschew aggression.  They consciously use the demonization of aggression to disarm traditional liberal democracies, who they correctly identify as their greatest enemies.  The soft left/liberals who have adopted PC-thought out of a desire to do and be "good" are unaware of how they facilitate violence.  It is this group that may be eventually amenable to enlightenment.]

PC-thought disarms those who are forced to adhere to its tenets.  In PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Part I I reviewed the process by which a child develops their sense of reality and explained how the ability to accurately assess reality is impaired by child abuse: [Emphasis added-SW]

In the typical case of parental child abuse, the abuse is traumatic in and of itself, but is given a spacial resonance by virtue of the perpetrator being one of the people the child most loves, trusts, and depends on. For an abused child, they are handed an impossible developmental task: The person they need so much has caused them terrible pain and distress. In the case of overt sexual abuse, it is even worse because of the violation of the child's bodily integrity. (It is common to see in survivors of childhood sexual abuse, ongoing fantasies of horrible internal objects/introjects, which are constantly threatening to emerge and attack them and people they love; sometimes this is "normalized" into fear of illness, genetic disorders, cancer lurking within.) Further, the abuser is often contrite (and often was intoxicated at the time of the transgression); the abuser will bind the child to maintaining their "special" secret, tell the child it was all the child's fault or the outgrowth of the abuser's great love for the child, or act as if the abuse never happened. In all these situations, the child can not, no matter how intelligent and how hard he struggles, make sense out of a reality which calls love hate and hate love. The only way to understand how the loved one could hurt them so much is to imagine that they did something wrong (often a minor transgression or an imagined transgression) and deserve or provoked the punishment or abuse. The adult who survives such abuse will tend to have difficulties in recognizing danger signs in new relationships. Many abused adult women will minimize their abuse by saying that their boyfriend or husband hit them because they love them so much. Furthermore, during the inter-abuse interval, the abuse is excused and/or seen as an aberration, most often caused by some mistake that the victim has done. "He really loves me but when he drinks he gets angry." or "He really loves me and works hard and I should have had dinner on the table the way he likes." Notice how the structure of these reactions is parallel to the child who can only explain the abuse by imagining he provoked it or "daddy didn't really mean it."

The abused child grows up to be an adult who in specific circumstances has a defect in their sense of reality. They are literally unable to see that the person they are becoming involved with has serious flaws which threaten to repeat the abuse they lived through as a child. They may know on an intellectual basis that a man with a bad temper who yells at them during the early stages of their courtship is a poor choice for a mate, but emotionally, they are blind to the danger they face and use defenses such as rationalization and denial to avoid knowing. This is not done consciously but has the effect of preventing them from protecting themselves from an abuser.

The survivor of abuse is left with the choice of accepting the reality of their own perceptions (Mommy/Daddy was an evil abusive monstrous person) or denying their own perceptions in order to preserve the image of the "loving" parent.  In a similar vein, PC-thought offers us the choice of believing the evidence of our own eyes, which risks our careers, social ostracism, and public shame or denying our own senses in order to remain a member in good standing of our community.  From PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Part II: [Emphasis added-SW]

Yesterday I described how childhood abuse creates an impossible contradiction for a child. He is faced with the choice of believing what an authority, who they love and depend on, tells him is reality ("I am doing this because I love you and its for your own good") versus his own immature perceptions of reality (this feels abusive and is hateful.) The resolution often requires the child to split his awareness of parts of reality and this "vertical splitting of the ego" becomes a stable structure throughout his life. Political Correctness creates the same kind of discontinuity in our conscious appreciation of reality.

Political Correctness has its roots in Post-Modernism and Deconstruction. I am hardly an expert in this area but it seems that the Deconstructionists took a small piece of reality, that all of us construct our sense of reality through our own subjectivity, and made it the primary determinant of reality, ie since we are all subjective, there can be no such thing as objective reality. In other words, the world of consensus reality is a construct and if we change how we view the world, we will change the construct.[Among the other evil offspring of this philosophy, we would have to include moral relativism and other (rationalized) excuses for inaction in the face of evil.]

The Child Abuser forces a splitting in the consciousness of the child as a way to protect himself from the danger of aggressive retaliation.  The child is forced into a passive, helpless, hopeless position from which there is no escape and no way to protect herself.  (The healthier/safer child, in response to the assault, mobilizes enough aggression to report the attack to an adult, through whose agency the child is able to retaliate and subsequently protect herself from the abuser in the future.)  The PC-thought police force a split in the consciousness of society for a similar purpose.  Any aggressive response to the assault is treated as if it is inappropriate and shameful.  The aggressive responders are labeled as racist, one of the definitive ways in which PC destroys those who resist, and all focus is placed on the various victims of the assault, which consciously includes the perpetrator, making him (relatively) immune to opprobrium.  Since this is on a societal basis, those protected include the radical Muslim Imams and spokesmen whose vile utterances are simply ignored by society's perceptual apparatus, the MSM(if we don't see it or hear it, it doesn't exist); those identified as victims include not just the direct victims of the shootings, but all soldiers.  Becoming a victim is a way to emphasize passivity and derail aggression.  Note the conclusion from Bill Bennett's post this morning:

President Obama is going to Ft. Hood today for a memorial service there. We will all be sorrowful and our hearts and minds and souls will be with everyone at Ft. Hood. My worry about these services now is that they are a) not angry enough and b) that they are the end and not the beginning. Ever since the week after 9/11/2001, anger has eluded memorial services (with the exception of Paul Wellstone’s memorial—that, somehow, was a moment of anger for the left). It is an American thing to pray, to be sorrowful, and then to be angry and fight. [Emphasis mien-SW]  I hope we still have the stuff for the last two parts.

Passivity in mourning is a regressive state.  Recall the 9^th "major symptom of large group regression" from Terror and Societal Regression:

9) Reactivation of a "chosen trauma" whereby a large group unconsciously "chooses" to make a shared mental representation of an event that caused it terrible losses, helplessness, humiliation, and victimization....Slobodan Milosevic exemplified this phenomenon in his reactivation of the shared memory of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which the Serbian hero, Prince Lazar, was killed.

Since 9/11 American group mourning has become a stylized choreography in which anger at the perpetrators of our trauma is minimized and our loss, our passivity, our helplessness, and our hopelessness in the face of murderous enemies are emphasized.  Rather than join in the public (faux) mourning that President Obama will preside over, let us allow the families their private mourning and rather dedicate ourselves to fighting the twin axis of Islamist terror and PC-thought.

The Cost of Avoiding Reality

Yesterday Glenn Reynolds linked to a very troubling essay by Jerry Pournelle, in which he considered how societies might evolve and eventually devolve.  He began the essay with some thoughts about the political philosophy of Ayn Rand: [All emphases mine-SW]

I suspect I know more about the views held by Miss Rand than most. I even met her once. That she never could explain is the basis for law. No one else can, really, either; as Burnham points out in The Machiavellians, a book well worth the time to seek out and read, there is no more compelling reason to assume that a government selected by 50% plus one of the male, or male and female, population is legitimate than to assume legitimacy for a monarchy ("Your fathers swore to my father, and you to me") or a social class (rule of the best). Aristotle noted many forms of government, some good, some bad, and nearly all changing one to another, republics becoming democracies which quickly degenerated into the many plundering the productive leading to anarchy leading to some form of tyranny, which if they were lucky would become monarchy, which would --- but you get the notion. John Stewart Mill said that "Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one." He did not contemplate a state -- such as the England he lived in -- preferring "diversity" to liberty, and abandoning liberty when they had achieved the maturity necessary for a liberal republic. It never seems to have occurred to him that nations could, in H Beam Piper's phrase, from Space Vikings, decivilize. I suspect that if he lived today he would reexamine his assumptions.

A stable and reasonably rational government is a gift from God or from the gods, and fortunate are the people who have such a gift. Of course they will one day spurn it.

Read the whole thing and consider what happens to a democracy when anti-democratic government policies which are themselves rooted in discrimination against the most productive parts of society are presented as based on fairness.  Further, consider what happens to that society when all discussion of the negative impacts of such policies are consistently forbidden by either social opprobrium or legal strictures.  When the negative outcomes are denied and/or hidden, a defensive structure composed of rationalizations, externalizations, projections, even paranoid delusions, must be erected to prevent awareness of the effects of the policy from penetrating the zeitgeist.  The citizens of such a society are then faced with the choice of denying reality and their own perceptions or risking persecution and ruin.

Any society that consistently denies reality and increasingly relies on less and less effective, and increasingly immature and pathological, defenses, will eventually fail to function.  Denying reality can never be an effective long term strategy.

The Social Singularity Continued

There are some questions that are so dangerous that most people simply refuse to consider them.  However as our technology begins to offer new tools, some of our unthinkable questions may well be answered within a mere generation. 

One such question concerns the third rail of sociology:  Are some groups incapable of success because of congenital deficits? 

Racists and bigots have traditionally labeled other ethnic groups as deficient and defective.  The Nazis took this its ultimate level in their attempt to destroy Jews, Gypsies, and all others who fell short of their conception of the master race, but the Nazis were neither the first nor the last to advocate and practice genocide.  In fact, a good argument can be made that throughout human history genocide of failed cultures has been the rule rather than the exception.  In this I am using an operational definition of (past) failed culture, ie cultures that proved to be unable to defend themselves. 

The two cultures that stand out as failures (as measured by common metrics) in our current times are sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world, with the greater Muslim world in a more ambiguous condition.  Part of the philosophical basis for invading Iraq was to establish that an Arab country could in fact become a modern state and join the developing world.  It remains unclear how this will play out.

We are now approaching a time when the genotypy and phenotypy of intelligence may be amenable to exploration in a scientific manner.  The implications of this are dramatic and cannot be understated.  Without a great deal of preparation the outcome of such research is likely to be extraordinarily traumatic.

Randall Parker at Future Pundit reports on some provocative research:

Twin Brain Scan Studies Find Genetic Influences On Intelligence

PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Links

For the sake of convenience I am putting links to all the "PC & Defects in Reality Testing" posts:

Introduction

Part I

Part II

Part III: "Words Matter"

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Confirmation

The blogosphere is alive and buzzing over the revelation that our military intelligence, via data mining, had identified Mohamed Atta and three or four other members of the 9/11 attack more than a year before they flew planes into the World Trade center.  Dr. Sanity has done some brilliant speculation about the role of Sandy Berger, he of the misplaced top secret documents that somehow got stuffed down his pants. (Just go to her site and scroll down.)   Captain Ed has more and brings in some interesting Iraq-al Qaeda connections that the 9/11 Omission left out of their final (non) report.  Jim Geraghty has a nice summary of what we know so far. 

I would like to throw in my little contribution to the mix.  As the title suggests, my discussion of PC, and the excellent comments, are germane.  There are really only a few possible explanations for the Able Danger story.

PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Part VI

Now we come to the heart of the matter, the psychodynamic processes that interfere with the ability to adequately recognize/perceive reality.

One of the most rewarding aspects of this blog has been the comments that others leave to advance the conversation.  With thanks to Robert Godwin, who left the following comment after Part V of this series:

It's very easy to dismiss leftist thought as emotional, because it is, but it is also based on a core of ideas about reality that are just plain wrong and dysfunctional, especially when their consequences are drawn out. For example, the politically correct assault on the existence of objective truth seems initially liberating, as we are freed from the dictates of arbitrary authority. However, the whole idea of individual pursuit of truth was a liberal project, since truth was not accepted a priori but was subject to criticism and logical or empirical demonstration. But with deconstruction, the entire concept of truth is undermined, so there is no way to arbitrate between competing notions if reality. Therefore, whoever has the power may enforce their version of reality, which is what political correctness is all about.

Neo-neocon has a wonderful post today, Why Bloggers Love Orwell. Like so many of us who first met Orwell in middle school, with Animal Farm and 1984, she was deeply affected by her first exposure to Orwell's thinkng.   She comments on his impact and power:

1984 seemed to weave a spell over me--so much that, for a week or so, it seemed more real than what was going on around me, and far more frightening. Winston Smith's travails seemed so terrifying and, in the end, so utterly devoid of hope, that it took me a while to come back again to my own world.

The most memorable part of the book to me, aside from Room 101 and the rats, was the section (an Appendix, I believe) about Newspeak. That words could be twisted into their opposites and used as propaganda ploys was a new thought to me at the time, but it made intuitive sense.

PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Part V

[This is part of a series on PC & Defects in Reality Testing.  Earlier posts are here: Introduction, Part I, Part II, "Words Matter" (Part III), & Part IV.]

In Part IV of this series, I described the primitive psychological defence of "splitting" and wondered: Why is the correspondence between splitting and Political Correctness important?

Howard Schwartz left a comment on that post which is worth repeating, in part:

SW has said that the infant splits the image of the good mother from the bad mother, and in this way helps to keep the image of the good mother good. What he has not said yet is that the infant, and obviously it is not just the infant, can extend the goodness to the image of the whole mother by taking her bad aspects and projecting them onto the father. Out of this you get the "oppressive white male," of which SW has spoken and with whom we are all familiar. Having preserved the perfect goodness of mother, though, the infant has created an image whose goodness cannot be doubted, and which serves as the bedrock of our experience of being loved. This makes her, by far, the most powerful image in the psyche.

The power of feminism arises from the fact that women, in our time, identify with this omnipotent maternal image, and speak in her name. Doubt what she says and you will quickly find that you lose her love, and indeed encounter her rage, which has the effect of causing the bottom to fall out of life.

And what she says is this: the oppressive white male, your father, has stolen my love, by subterfuge and force. He has done this at the cost of the love that should have gone to others, which is to say all those who are not heterosexual white males. He should be deprived of love for this and hated, while those from whom he has stolen love should be loved exquisitely, in compensation.

When Howard describes the projection of all the bad aspects and projecting (attributing) them onto the father, he is pointing out that when splitting occurs, there is always an idealized object, and a corresponding devalued object. In the case of Political Correctness, the "oppressive white male" is the repository of all the bad that exists, while all the goodness in life belongs to the primitive, all loving mother. Since the process of splitting is unconscous, the recognition of its defensive distance from reality is lost. The most interesting aspect of splitting is that even when a person can recognize, intellectually, that it is impossible for anyone to be "all good" or "all bad", emotionally the distinction is unavailable.

A typical example from therapy would be the patient who falls for the "perfect man". [This is based on many patients, male and female, who have had experiences almost identical to this, but with minor deifferences on the margins.] He is loving, brilliant, talented; the fact that he is 40, has never been in a long term relationship that lasted more than 6 months, and still lives with his mother is recognized, but dismissed. The patient rationalizes that he just hasn't met the right girl yet, and she will be the one who will fit. Asking about the "red flags" would usually elicit an annoyed response, something allong the lines that the Therapist "doesn't understand and doesn't want her to be happy." Four months later, the patient bitterly complains that this man was emotionally limited, too attached to his mother to ever have a relationship, and not even that smart. Reminding her that she had known this from the start, an insightful patient agreed that she had known, but that it hadn't "sunk in" at the time; it wasnt emotionally meaningful.

Howars Schawrtz also notedt:

By the way, SW has said that the prevalence of such splitting can be traced to abuse during childhood. I doubt that a cultural phenomenon of such breadth, especially one that has arisen among the most privileged, indulged, and even loved people that God ever made, can be explained by the maltreatment of some individuals.

I purposely used the example of childhood abuse to make the process of splitting more understandable. In fact, there is some tendency toward splitting in certain, normal, circumstances that exist for all of us.

PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Part IV

In my last post, I quoted Howard S. Schwartz on the change in atmospherics and intellectual debate in the university under the sway of PC. While his question referred to a specific debate (ostensibly about the Oedipal Complex), in reality, his question is germane to any subject which has been declared at odds with prevailing the tenets of Politically Correct thinking. His comments bear repeating:

"How did ideas representing such ignorance not only arise in a university setting,, but also come to be dominant within it, and to dominate it so powerfully that it has become acceptable to meet alternative ideas with rage and disdain?"

There are a number of factors at work in this formulation. When rage and disdain are activated in a setting where they are out of proportion to the situation, it is a tell-tale suggesting that the pressure of internal, unconscious forces are in play. If I am challenged by someone who suggests that Psychoanalysis is not truly a science because it can not generate testable or falsifiable hypotheses, I can react in several different ways. I could respond that while it is unethical to do the actual experiments, we can observe the "naturalistic" results of our work and can predict, within limits, the outcome of mutative interpretations, allowing that there may be multiple ways in which to understand the data thus generated. Alternatively, I could react with "rage and disdain" and wonder how such a fool as the questioner could challenge my authority. I think that any reasonable observer would be able to tell which reaction is the more appropriate and which suggests that I have an unacknowledged agenda that has been threatened by the challenge.

When a powerful emotional reaction is elicited where it is unwarranted, look to the unconscious determinants.

PC & Defects in Reality Testing: "Words Matter"

Today is a very sad day in the world of bloggers.  Stephen Vincent, an American freelance journalist who posted at In The Red Zone, was doing what reporters have traditionally done; he exposed himself to danger in order to report to us what was happening in a crucial part  of the world.  Wretchard sums up what made this man important, using some of his own words from a CNN interview:

What compelled him to cover a battlefield of the war on terror "traveling without security or official connections, living by his wits," according to the Spence Publishing site? CNN gives the answer in Vincent's own words.

"I stood that morning on the roof of my building in lower Manhattan and watched United Airlines Flight 175 strike the south tower of the World Trade Center," Vincent said in a December 2004 interview with Frontpage Magazine. "At that moment, I realized my country was at war -- because of the 1993 attack on the Trade Center, I figured our enemy was Islamic terrorism -- and I wanted to do my part in the conflict. I'm too old to enlist in the armed services, so I decided to put my writing talents to use."

In that interview Vincent described the weapons with which he intended to fight.

"Words matter. Words convey moral clarity. Without moral clarity, we will not succeed in Iraq. That is why the terms the press uses to cover this conflict are so vital. For example, take the word “guerillas.” As you noted, mainstream media sources like the New York Times often use the terms “insurgents” or “guerillas” to describe the Sunni Triangle gunmen, as if these murderous thugs represented a traditional national liberation movement. But when the Times reports on similar groups of masked reactionary killers operating in Latin American countries, they utilize the phrase “paramilitary death squads.” Same murderers, different designations."