The SJW Banhammer: Not “some great redneck beast slouching towards Washington”

How do you start a post? What do you talk about? I spent last night talking to the sister of my ex wife, who had come over to see her nephews, and finding her a Schofield reference bible, and in the process finding two new translations into English, one of which looks good, so paypal got hammered because I got one of these for me.

The translation that the text uses here is the ESV, which I like, for it is more readable than some of the most literal translations, but it still looks at being as accurate as possible. I use it for it follows the Anglican Lectionary. And having chosen the text from Micah, which follows what we have been talking about over the last few days, I find this in my email box from one of our sisters.

Due to my (sometimes) controversial posts, I’m contemplating on whether or not I should change my blog to private or just password protect some of my posts.

I will most likely go with the later.

This is not because I’m afraid of opposing opinions or views, but because I want to protect my identity when it comes to these type of posts.

As you know, liberals can be very vicious and don’t have any qualms butting in and ruining somebody’s livelihood. I’m just trying to protect my future.

It is very interesting how the idea of “Dirty Politics” — a book written after a hacker stole the emails and facebook posts of Cameron Slater, the most active right-wing blogger in New Zealand — has now become a fact to the left.

They have taken data, selected data, of unproven provenance, and made it fact: indeed they are now saying that these tactics are used elsewhere. We have to remember that the rulers of our nation are not necessarily those in power, and that the activists, those social justice warriors whom our sister is afraid of, detest justice.

And we need to not lose courage, for our LORD is active, and he will destroy the power of those who trade in perverse laws and institutionalized lies.

Hear this, you heads of the house of Jacob
and rulers of the house of Israel,
who detest justice
and make crooked all that is straight,
who build Zion with blood
and Jerusalem with iniquity.
Its heads give judgment for a bribe;
its priests teach for a price;
its prophets practice divination for money;
yet they lean on the LORD and say,
“Is not the LORD in the midst of us?
No disaster shall come upon us.”
Therefore because of you
Zion shall be plowed as a field;
Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins,
and the mountain of the house a wooded height.

It shall come to pass in the latter days
that the mountain of the house of the LORD
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and it shall be lifted up above the hills;
and peoples shall flow to it,
and many nations shall come, and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between many peoples,
and shall decide for strong nations far away;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore;
but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree,
and no one shall make them afraid,
for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken.
For all the peoples walk
each in the name of its god,
but we will walk in the name of the LORD our God
forever and ever.

(Micah 3:9-4:5 ESV)

I can hear the teeth of the populace of Te Aro Valley, the spiritual home of the SJW, grinding. This scripture is so… Zionist. God is cis-gendered. Leave us alone in our little valley, let us make our own world, and let us export that hell.

Not going to happen. God is not man, that he should change his mind, nor the son of man, that he should repent. He ignores our fashions, our reversion to paganism and perversity, and calls us, over and over to righteousness.

And the pushback from these effete complainers is throughout the twitterspace and facesplat because they want to be blind to the fact they are losing. They have reached too far. Their time is past. During this time, which is a form of political, if not spiritual warfare, one of the things men have to do is get their banhammer out and defend the more gentle, the more vulnerable, the weaker.

This is one reason why people like Dalrock are getting haters at present, and even obscure blogs like this one have been named as evil fundamentalists. These people now lack discernment.

I worried that some literal-minded puritan had taken me seriously and launched a crusade. That doesn’t seem to have happened. But phrases from my piece have turned up in several accounts of the legendary Green Eggs ban, and one article actually links to my old column to back up its claims, apparently unaware that I was making a joke. It’s true that I never claimed that this ban actually happened anywhere, so those references to California and the ’90s didn’t come from me. But The Lorax, another Seuss book, really has faced parental opposition in California; and an alleged Green Eggs ban in China reportedly ended in 1991. Both of those factlets were mentioned in some of the same articles that claimed a gay-hating Grundy had tried to keep kids from reading Green Eggs and Ham. I suspect that at some point in the chain of transmission, those different elements got mixed up.

Someone once said that if a spooky legend catches on, it says something true about the anxieties of the people who believe and repeat the tale, even if it says absolutely nothing true about the subject of the story itself. My yarn may be more funny than scary—that’s what I was aiming for, anyway—but the idea that people would prohibit a harmless children’s book is still pretty frightening. And it’s not hard to imagine what underlying worries might be at work here.

Many educated elites live in fear of Bible-thumping troglodytes haunting the hinterlands, some great redneck beast slouching towards Washington to make Sarah Palin president. Book-banning stories are tailor made to fit that terror. Palin herself had to deal with rumors in 2008 that she had tried to fire a librarian who wouldn’t remove reams of offensive texts from the shelves. The Guardian once ran an Amanda Marcotte editorial under the headline “The Tea Party moves to ban books.” The editorial contained exactly zero examples of Tea Partiers trying to ban anything.

There really are crusaders out there whose fear of demons leads them to try to suppress speech. Just ask the American Library Association. But there are also people whose fear of demons leads them to imagine book bonfires where none exist.

Sorry, folks.

I do not live in a cave. I have three degrees and a specialist fellowship. My Hirsch factor (number of papers cited greater than that number of times), according to google scholar, is 16.

However, I was educated by an earlier generation, who introduced me to Keats, Shakespeare, Donne and Joyce: I discovered Francis Schaeffer and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn by myself. I enjoy country culture: but I prefer a good coffee to whiskey and small european cars to big block Fords. My bad.

You see I am not American, and I dislike Wellington, our local capital: in my ideal world parliament would meet in a shed (I would allow doric columns and a roof, but no walls) in the depths of winter, and all sessions would happen with everyone standing. I have no interest in slouching towards Washington.

I would rather live a quiet, sober and righteous life. But at this time, this is under attack. And the vulnerable need to be defended.