Thursday, January 12, 2012

Moral relativism at work


  Well it proves one thing ...   It proves that you wealthy college boys don't have education enough to admit when you're wrong.
 ~ Sam Quint, Jaws

The more I observe Brooks Simpson, the more I wonder how someone of his pettiness and questionable integrity managed to obtain a position of such importance as a professor of history at a major state university.

Last month, there was the silliness of tacking a deadline onto Kevin Levin's "Chandler Challenge." Remember that?  Mere days after the challenge appeared on "Civil War Memory" Simpson was chiding Southern heritage advocates for not replying to the challenge -- and declaring "victory" for Levin. I pointed out to him that Levin had issued no deadline, and likely the busy-ness of the holidays kept some people from taking the time to locate and buy the magazine. Some may have tried to buy it and found it wasn't available in their bookstores yet.  A couple of people had mentioned that at Levin's own site.

So Simpson, apparently not realizing how petty and childish it made him look, tacked on an artificial deadline after the fact -- to a challenge that he didn't even originate.

Then, there was his chiding me for not reading Brian Steele Wills' biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest -- only minutes after his recommending it.

He demands instant results, instant compliance for the purpose of slinging accusations, employing the tar-brush, and/or publishing insinuation and innuendo if he doesn't get them.

Frequently, his demand-tantrums are combined with other smear tactics, such as guilt by association.  Guilt of what?  Why, racism, of course.  It's one of the very few bad things left in an American transformed by liberalism's moral relativism.

Exactly why he has developed such an obsession with the Southern Heritage Preservation Group on Facebook is mystifying.  Presumably, it does something for his ego to criticize the group's designation as Southern rather than Confederate, or to point out the imaginary "racism" of its members.  But why?  What's it to him?  It's not like the group has any sway in the greater scheme of things.

The SHPG not a 501C3 nonprofit group with tens of thousands of members like the Civil War Trust.  It's not the SCV, which has thousands of members, highly visible heritage defense efforts, and a legal department not afraid to use the courts when necessary. It's not even the Civil Warriors blog and forum. It's just a Facebook group, just one of 620 MILLION Facebook groups.

In other words, it's an internet-based social media anyone can join -- anonymously.  Most of the group's 1,300+ members are lurkers who never post.  Some people use it to post or read about heritage issues around the country, but clearly, most activity on the group's  page comprises the airing and sharing of personal opinions. In other words, it's a discussion group/chat room -- i.e., Mark Zuckerberg's updated version of Usenet. It has little to no power or influence.

Thus, Simpson's interest in the group is mystifying. I can only chalk it up to the liberal obsession with rooting out divergent beliefs and eradicating them. Nobody, and I mean nobody, must be allowed to hold, let alone express, an opinion different from the status quo -- which, of course, is determined by Simpson and his fellow travelers.

His obsession with declaring guilt-by-association is more revealing of him than he realizes, perhaps.  Most intelligent people realize that how people differ is at least as important as how they are similar.  You'd think the champions of diversity would be the first to acknowledge this, because without differences, there'd BE no such thing as diversity.

But not in Simpson's mentality.  If a racist is wearing a green plaid shirt, then everyone who wears a green plaid shirt is a racist. Thus, all who support, say, political independence for the South, are mental clones in all other areas -- so The League of the South = the Southern Nationalist Network = Occidental Dissent. Pay no attention to how these groups differ (two of them don't even appear to be groups, just websites); to Simpson, that doesn't matter, regardless of how true it is. When your purpose is to smear people with racism, can't let a little incidental like TRUTH get in the way.

Shortly after a Hunter Wallace, who runs the website titled Occidental Dissent, joined the SHPG, Simpson threw a typical tantrum at Crossroads, chiding members for tolerating racists in violation of the group's stated policy. Of course, Simpson has no access to private discussions of the group's officers, so he didn't know that said officers were already privately discussing Wallace's membership when Simpson posted his tantrum on Crossroads.

He's like a little kid, demanding instant gratification, and thinking everything that happens, happens because of him. And if he doesn't know about it, it doesn't exist...

Keep in mind that this petty childishness and moral relativism are exhibited by a professor of history at a major state university.  It's scary to think of  young minds in learning-mode coming under his influence.


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Image of  Robert Shaw as  as Quint  in the movie Jaws translinked from ScrapeTV under Fair Use of U.S. Copyright law.

10 comments :

  1. Excellent Connie! I don't have the time to spend perusing the sites of these idiots that throw tantrums and wouldn't recognize truth, even when it hits them between the eyes. Thank God for those of you who do! Your depiction of Simpson, and his ilk, as the childish breed that they are was/is right on target! When they all get together in Neverland they constitute the "Lost Boys" and gather round joining in to sing a verse of "I Don't Want to Grow Up"! In their "historical" meetings they all stand around fighting over which of them will be Peter Pan - of course, we know which one is Tinkerbell! They accuse Southern Heritage supporters of being Lost Causers - but that is 100 times better tan being lost boys, like them!

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. Guilt-by-Association

    From this should I conclude that everyone who teaches at Arizona State is a white racist?-

    "Arizona State University should be embarrassed for this behavior. But given the racially-disgusting behavior of university officials in the past, they are probably quite proud."
    http://newsone.com/newsone-original/boycewatkins/arizona-state-fans-blackface-2/

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  4. Miss Connie -- is there supposed to be something particularly incriminating of Forrest in the biography by Wills?

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  5. What are those Arizona State professors teaching students there????????????????

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  6. I made the mistake of commenting on his blog...only to have a whole page devoted to me as an attempt to paint with his racist brush. The man posted every imaginable negative comment about me, my profession and called in his wolves for a feast. My attempts to respond to the comments got cut off leaving a continual display of ugly, hateful postings. I was left with one last resort. Now the blog posting has been removed. I will issue the warning here as I know this man will read this.....continue to your own detriment sir.

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  7. Eddie, best I can tell, judging by Simpson's description of the book, Wills sez Forrest was "involved" with the KKK. LOL! I already been told that and told that, ha! Whether the book actually supplies what I'm looking for remains to be determined.

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  8. John, you not only guilty of commenting on his blog -- you are a white person who has committed the unpardonable racist sin of DOING GENEALOGY. Don't you know it is racist for descendants of white Europeans to do genealogy?

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  9. I had never heard of the SHPG until Kevin Levin and Brooks Simpson started condemning it.

    Purely as a joke, I went over there and made some rather unremarkable comments. I did it just to see if Brooks would get his panties in wad and have a hysterical reaction.

    Sure enough, I wasn't there a day before he started thundering with righteous indignation. Point being made, I returned to my own website.

    Brooks is the archetype of the self righteous, fanatical, intolerant Yankee busybody and conformist. No one has owned a slave in the South in almost 150 years now.

    Guess what? It was never really about slavery. Just like it is not about "racism" today. What it is really about is the Yankee assumption - premised on arrogance and bigotry - that they are better than everyone else.

    In order to prove they are better than everyone, the Yankee is constantly discovering new sins and diagnosing them in other peoples. There is racism, sexism, nativism, isolationism, xenophobia, homophobia, heterocentrism, and so forth.

    One might ask a rational question: when and how did these various -isms come to be.confused with moral philosophy? Just what the hell is this moral code and where did it come from?

    The sin of racism, for example, was completely unknown to Jesus and the church fathers. It was unknown to Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther. It was unknown to Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus, and the Stoics.

    Voltaire, Hegel, Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche were "racists." Thomas Jefferson was a "racist." Even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were "racists." Charles Darwin was such a huge racist that the subtitle of On the Origin of Species is "of the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life."

    The term "racism" did not appear in America until the 1930s. It was not considered immoral until the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, we can make a strong historical argument that Americans only started to believe that racism is immoral because people on television started making that argument.

    If there was some connection between racism and morality, then it would have been a source of commentary over the past 2,000 years of Western history. Instead, we find that no one but fringe groups identified racism with immortality until the twentieth century in both Western and non-Western cultures.

    OTOH, Western and non-Western cultures were both obsessed with honor which has been strongly identified with ethics for centuries. There is nothing moral or immoral about racism.

    Moral qualities are things like honesty, integrity, and fortitude. "Racism" asks purely factual questions about the nature of reality. It is a theory that organizes observations like heliocentrism.

    Brooks is a nothing more than a self righteous laughingstock.

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  10. It was Brooks ancestors who burned witches and practiced The Scarlett Letter. Jefferson Davis labeled them "the disturbers of the peace of the world."

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