Intellectual Mistakes

An interesting comment appeared under Jimmy and the Hamas Gang I like constructive thinking. So I have posted my response.

“Fatah--was corrupt and unaccountable, ciphoning millions of dollars away from the Palestinian people”

When a county’s biggest contributor to GDP is foreign aid you can bet your bottom dollar the government is corrupt. Palestine doesn’t afford it citizen’s religious, political or economic freedom. When the only way to access wealth is through strong arming your way to political power men will inevitably become ruthless in order to gain and maintain power. I acknowledge Fatah is corrupt but this corruption is predictable in an oppressed state which only succeeds in so far as it can procure international welfare.

“Hamas has been building schools and homes and providing clean water for people”.

The soup kitchen is the dictator’s oldest trick. Hitler posed with the elderly. Castro visits the sick. The mob fed the homeless. Nationalism and benevolence are the autocrat’s favorite form of propaganda. Villains always seek to been seen compassionate towards the very misery they are solely responsible for.

“The fact is that "ideology" (at least how you construe the word in your blog) is a throw-away term the leisure classes use.”

Ideology is hardly a “middle class catch word” or a “throw-away term.” It refers to the prevailing moral philosophy of a mind (originating with metaphysics and concluding with politics). It makes resulting actions a predictable result of a mind’s intellectual foundation. Anyone who understands the communist—capitalist dichotomy from either a historical or philosophical perspective realizes the practical implications of opposing ideologies. The difference between slavery and freedom is very real.

But to that point more directly— The way the left, or thinkers sympathetic to socialist aims, discredit concepts (ideology is a concept) is through the collective doctrine of moral equivalence (there are no differences in things. Things are just things. The only difference in things is the words we attach to them—this is how terrorists become freedom fighters and Capitalism and Communism becomes on in the same; two radical ideologies, two interesting words—their actual definitions are obliterated). Moral equivalence is an arbitrary metaphysical and epistemological foundation. Through the virtue of discernment man is able to judge opposing values. Moral equivalence seeks to obliterate the value associated with this productive process.

Individuals and nations governed by principle are less sustebile to whimsical thinking and easily acknowledge that it is immoral to trade with or send aid to a nation whose moral foundation rests upon the destruction of another race.