Shut up and pay for it!

The allure of victimhood

Jesse James writes,

A rational person cannot explain how an individual can chant ‘Love Trumps Hate’ while burning things in the street or beating someone half to death for their political views. An addict is more than capable of that about face without a second thought.

What could hundreds of thousands of people of every race, color and creed be addicted to? Victimhood. We have grown up understanding that being a victim in the statist sense of the word means you are not responsible for any and all actions you do.

...It’s an admittedly alluring concept, a life of consequence-free living. It’s not real, but don’t tell poor Bernie that. What happens when you aren’t a victim, however? The obvious answer is to invent a debilitating something, wave your affliction around and now you’re in business. We used to admire people for excelling in a field or a discipline. The millennials have taken that same approach to victimhood and what we watched in Portland was the Victimhood Olympics.

...Our focus should be on what the Victims Inc. employees are trying to obtain. The nonsense made up to get there is unimportant, but rather, what is the goal? If you look closely, the goal is that of all statists, ‘revolutionaries,’ progressives and whatever other flag they fly. Coercion. Do what I say, give me your stuff. I want no accountability, you may have no voice or contrary opinion, and I am entitled up to and including your very life if I am displeased with you.

Read more here.

Consent and coercion in Nazi Germany

"On balance, most people seemed prepared to live with the idea of a surveillance society, to put aside the opportunity to develop the freedoms we usually identify with liberal democracies, in return for crime-free streets, a return to prosperity, and what they regarded as a good government…In their successful cultivation of popular opinion, the Nazis did not need to use widespread terror against the population to establish the regime… Many Germans went along, not because they were mindless robots, but because they convinced themselves of Hitler’s advantages and of the ‘positive’ sides of the new dictatorship."

Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, by Robert Gellately, 2001, pg. 256-7

From Scott Ott's Tumbler page

A license for unlimited coercion

Atheist Robert Tracinski writes:

As far as I know, Christ was the first to insist that even the lowest, least significant person has value and that we will be judged by how we treat him.

Islam has no corresponding idea. The news is constantly bringing us a story of some imam somewhere declaring it consistent with Islam for a man to beat his wife, and the rise of the Islamic State in Syria has provided us current examples of Islam sanctioning slavery, including the capture and systematic rape of sex slaves. This is a religion that is still very much in the “rights of the conqueror” mode, in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

...If you add up all of these things, you see what an explosive mix you get from Islam: the expectation that religion dictates everything and that their religion ought to be totally dominant here in this world, combined with the notion that religion is not open to reason and leaves no room for doubt, questioning, or debate.

Read more here.