The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Mandatory Reading: “Collectivism and the Presumption of Guilt”

Posted on | December 22, 2014 | 22 Comments

by Smitty

Go over and read this excellent piece by Hayward in full. A taste (emphasis original):

This presumption of guilt is absolutely crucial to collectivism. The Left must teach its subjects to think of themselves as criminals. That’s the only way law-abiding people will endure levels of coercive power that would normally require specific accusations, a fair trial, and the possibility of appeals. Social-justice “crimes” can be prosecuted without any of those things. There is no appeal from the sentence, and no statute of limitations on the crimes, as any left-winger who thinks today’s American citizens need to suffer for the historical offense of slavery will be happy to explain to you. There’s no evidence you can present in your defense, for the Left has read your mind, and knows better than you what demons lurk in its recesses.
This is one reason the Left dislikes the trappings of constitutional law and order.

Our recovery from Progressivism is going to hinge upon restoring the distinction between theological guilt, “All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” and legal guilt, which still requires due process.

It’s almost  as if Progress is about substituting government for God. . .

via Hot Air headlines

Category: Culture, Hot Air

Comments

22 Responses to “Mandatory Reading: “Collectivism and the Presumption of Guilt””

  1. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 1:32 pm

    Sinners in the hand of an angry God Progressive Mob.

  2. smitty
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 1:48 pm

    “Dinners in the maw of an angry dog.”

  3. richard mcenroe
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 2:36 pm

    But don’t neglect the adversarial change — or evolution — in progthink.

    In the 60’s, the mantra was, “but really, aren’t we all guilty?” if a member of a politically protected class committed a really horrible crime, or a company polluted a creek, or a child went hungry because its three-hundred-pound dole-prole parents weren’t feeding it.

    Today, the mantra is, “YOU’RE all guilty!” spoken with absolute self-righteousness and a total lack of self-awareness,usually by the people who are actually doing what we are accused of. WE have committed the new Original Sin of being born white, or in this country, or of wanting to work to provide for our families*, or wanting to protect our loved ones, etc.

    (*BTW, how many GIVE US JOBS signs did you see in Ferguson, or the Occupy encampments, or the anti-cop rallies in NYC? Just curious.)

  4. smitty
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 2:38 pm

    Along the same timeline there is a shift in power toward the Commies.

  5. RKae
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 2:50 pm

    “Eventually it was discovered, that God did not want us to be all the same. This was Bad News for the Governments of The World, as it seemed contrary to the doctrine of Portion Controlled Servings. Mankind must be made more uniformly if The Future was going to work. Various ways were sought to bind us all together, but, alas, same-ness was unenforceable. It was about this time, that someone came up with the idea of Total Criminalization. Based on the principle, that if we were all crooks, we could at last be uniform to some degree in the eyes of The Law. […] Total Criminalization was the greatest idea of its time and was vastly popular except with those people, who didn’t want to be crooks or outlaws, so, of course, they had to be tricked into it.” – Frank Zappa (from the liner notes to “Joe’s Garage”)

  6. Fail Burton
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 2:53 pm

    And part of that historic guilt means history must be rearranged so European white supremacy, slavery and colonialism existed in a vacuum in a game no one else played from the 16th to 19th centuries.

    The African partnership without which the Atlantic Slave Trade could not have existed disappears in a puff of smoke. So does the European colonization and white slave trade of the Ottoman Empire. Centuries of the attempted colonization, slave raids, and invasions from N. Africa into S. Europe reaching even into County Cork, Cornwall, and Russia disappear.

    In India the East Indian Company’s colonization of India is remembered and the Islamic and ethnic Timurid Mughal Empire that built the Taj Mahal is forgotten. Aztecs, Incans, Fatamids, Turkish Mamluks in Egypt – they all disappear. Postcolonization never means Ireland, Spain or the Balkans, or Poland. It only ever means non-whites, period.

    The intersectionalist version of history, with its genocided witches, prehistoric benevolent matriarchies, Nubian scholars at Alexandria, and fake heterosexuality and incest taboos white men have cleverly smeared about is a daffy lie put at the service of every last place nag that ever ran a race and lost. For the slaving, colonialist, human-sacrificing and imperialist Aztecs to have been defeated by Europeans automatically puts them in a Garden of Eden of wide-eyed innocence.

  7. smitty
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 2:57 pm

    Awesome quote. I’ve used that before myself.

  8. Adobe_Walls
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 3:46 pm

    The noble savage myth.

  9. Adobe_Walls
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 3:53 pm

    The left and it’s SJWs have always believed that they should be able to prosecute for acts they thought should be illegal as opposed to acts are illegal. They have now figured out that can get away with merely persecuting those who violate their standards.

  10. Quartermaster
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 4:06 pm

    There is no almost to it. Their goal is to substitute government for the living God.

  11. Jim R
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 4:15 pm

    Exactly.

  12. Jim R
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 4:27 pm

    I suggest that recovering from Progressivism will also require us to stop lumping people into groups based on alleged bad actions / beliefs. We are individuals who should be judged on what we do, not what we look like.

    I was floored a few weeks ago when one of these SJW types, a well-to-do young graduate of a private university who is also a “person of color”, sneered at my suggestion that Martin Luther King showed us the way. This person’s response was that King’s dream was basically so much tripe: our country’s history is so racist that we can never achieve the goal of NOT judging people based on skin color. Indeed, this person DEMANDS to be seen as a minority. Just in a good way, I suppose. It was really bizarre: “White people are racist because they judge me for my skin color… which I want them to do.”

    Riiiiiight…

  13. texlovera
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 4:35 pm

    Precisely why the founders enshrined the presumption of innocence into the Constitution. Any attempt to weaken that is, by default, unconstitutional and unlawful.

  14. Fail Burton
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 4:53 pm

    In the normal world we call it Final Score: Pittsburgh 24, Jets 0. We move on and at best hope the Jets do better. In intersectionalism, Pitt becomes a racist kyriarchal supremacy of oppression and the DOJ demands an investigation into “My Jets.” Diversity is demanded and quotas are put in place. Eventually the goal of all games ending in a tie is achieved. Peace and love rule the world. And then China invades cuz no gender studies courses.

  15. Juliette Akinyi Ochieng
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 5:56 pm

    Progressives want to be the saviors of black people. That’s why black conservatives get them so riled up.

  16. boinkie
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 9:18 pm

    the war on policemen is a proxy for Obama’s war on working class, ethnics, and Republican white people, who refuse to join the white liberal elites’ acceptance of being ashamed of their race.

    So the result? they inspired the murder of a Hispanic and a Chinese American policemen. And the press hasn’t even noticed this irony, or the irony that 53 percent of NYCity’s finest are “people of color” (yes, Wikipedia used that exact phrase).

  17. Daniel O'Brien
    December 22nd, 2014 @ 10:06 pm

    Did you hear about the dyslexic, agnostic insomniac?

    He stayed up all night wondering if there was a dog.

  18. Daniel Freeman
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 3:31 am

    Xenophilia as the flip side of oikophobia.

  19. theBuckWheat
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 10:15 am

    You say it is almost as if Progressivism is about substituting government for God. Funny you should draw that conclusion because it is exactly true.

    Collectivism is the fraudulent ideology that we each will be better off when we live at the expense of everyone else. That violates three of the Ten Commandments: it is a lie; it is based on theft; theft is fomented by coveting. The Apostle Paul twice states that coveting is idolatry (eg: Ephesians 5:5), which itself violates a Commandment.

    Václav Havel, in his essay The Power of the Powerless, showed what pervasive spiritual dysfunction that collectivism brings to a people. It brings deep, institutionalized and indeed even existential sin and death.

  20. CRJ 422 Week 3 DQ 2 Criminal Justice Tools
    December 23rd, 2014 @ 8:40 pm

    CRJ 422 Week 3 DQ 2 Criminal Justice Tools

    Mandatory Reading: ?Collectivism and the Presumption of Guilt? : The Other McCain

  21. Silence Dogood
    December 27th, 2014 @ 6:45 pm

    Which gods, exactly? There’s so many, how can you pick just one?

  22. Quartermaster
    December 28th, 2014 @ 12:39 am

    Obviously too poorly educated to understand the reference.