My Struggles

Johann at Hari's Place has returned from the mountain with 10 Commandments for secular jihad. No quiet lifer he.

1= The fight against Islamofasiscm

Huzzah ! We agree ! This may not be repeated. Although as I've said before, that Sayyed Qutb talks a lot of sense.

1= The fight against climate change

Now had he said 'human-induced climate change' I think I could have agreed. But if he wants to fight against climate change per se he may as well shout 'No to the Third Law of Thermodynamics !' Somebody tell him about the Ice Ages, or the Greenland Vikings ...

1= The fight against the continuing existence and potential use of nuclear weapons

Well the only way to fight against the 'potential use' of something is to make sure that something doesn't exist. So we must disarm - and presumably the Americans too. I await with interest his proposals for disarming Iran, Israel, Pakistan, South Africa, North Korea and India.

4= The fight to extend democracy to peoples remaining under tyranny or in anarchic failed states
Vote Bush 2004.

5= The fight to ensure that democracy is meaningful, and not hollowed out by corporations, the rich, religious groups or other vested interests

Meaningful democracy for Johann, alas, is democracy where he agrees with the verdict. When a combination of the gay lobby and anti-family children's liberation activists (who now control all the major children's charities) enabled the age of consent for uphill gardening to be reduced to 16 I don't remember him shouting about the will of the people. Some vested interests are more equal than others.

6= The fight for equality for gay people

Equality=special treatment. Why should two sisters sharing a house not benefit from the same inheritance tax treatment as a couple of sensible shoe girlies ?

7= The fight for equality for women

Equality=equality of outcome. Life's too short even to start on this ... I'll leave it to Peter.

8= The fight to end the disastrous ‘War on Drugs’

Come on - they're not that expensive.

9= The fight to end the spiritual tyranny of ‘religion’, better labeled organized superstition, and to ensure its replacement with Enlightenment values

Among the Native British, Johann, the fight has been won - with consequences you can look at in the crime/STD/suicide/drug use figures - or just hit the town centre on a Friday night. And you've got most of the (increasingly irrelevant - as by your lights it should be) Church of England hierarchy on your side.
Elsewhere yet another author is wondering where Enlightenment values have got us. Hat tip to Her Majesty and the Pooter of Geek.


10 The fight against poverty, which breaks down into a fight: (a) against the extreme and undemocratic neo-liberalism imposed on much of the world’s poor by the IMF and World Bank; there is no freedom in a sweat-shop (b) against the remaining scraps of Stalinism that repress all markets, as in North Korea (c) The fight for social democracy – which means markets tempered by extensive corporate regulation, a welfare state, redistributive taxation, and social investment in education and public health

Hang on - we've got all of point c) in Britain currently. Must be why we're all so happy.

The more I read of Johann's stuff the more it sinks in how very young he is, and how very unconnected his ideas are. When I was his age I thought that 'Dance, F***, and Smoke Dope !' was the prescription for the good life. There are a host of educated Brits, brought up in the dying embers of our Judeo-Christian culture, who think it can be thrown away while miraculously all the good elements will persist. Richard Dawkins sits in an eight-hundred year old Christian institution and waits for religion, like the post-revolutionary state, to wither away.

Replace religion with "Enlightenment Values" ! You can see Enlightenment values all around you on the streets of Britain. Enjoy ?