Did Hitler Kill Millions In The Name Of Carrots?
– according to Kathy Shaidle on TVO last night that’s not necessarily an unreasonable question to ask at all.
There’s only one rational explanation, TVO invited her on as the token stupid person.
[h/t Robert McClelland of My Blahg who offered this up when my capture software died]
Haven’t seen the show, but the guy makes a good point. Stalin wasn’t killing people in the name of atheistic communism. He was killing people in order to ensure his dictatorial powers and the party oligarchy.
THE CARROT WARS!!!!
oh man I have to run this by Mark,… ROTFLMAO BAhahahahahahaha,….
Sorry, a very old inside joke from our old D&D days
Well Ralph, this is a clear display of the level of intellectual honest that Kathy Shiadle exercises. She is clearly a racist on some levels, she is mean spirited, hateful and dishonest,… These are hardly qualities that should make her a champion of free speech. Her only value is be used as the subject of a cautionary tale,…
That slap down by Dr. Buckman was great. The fact that he kept a civil demeanor and straight face added to the beauty. Your title is hilarious.
This is what inevitably happens when a right whinger crawls out of their echo chamber and tries to interact with adults.
You know, it’s been a good couple of weeks. Mark Stey and Ezra Levant, publicly humiliated by a conscientious, honest man; exposure of Kathy’s Shaidle’s shallowness, and her subsequent meltdown; and Frances Widdowson’s precipitous retreat.
The final indicator will be if Anne Coulter’s new book tanks. Anne’s a sweet girl, and although we haven’t spoken much since the breakup, I harbour no ill wishes. But it will be interesting to see whether or not the world truly is sick of ill-informed, pit-bull pundits.
And replace them with what? More war and pestilence?
Nope. Better, smarter, more honest pundits.
Better, smarter and more honest people don’t pundit.
This is all fun, but I think you are all making a mistake in trying to reduce her with adjectives like “shallow” or “dishonest”. Would that she was. She is toxic by her combination of hate, absolute conviction and utter humourlessness (has anyone got a picture of this woman smiling?), but she is certainly not stupid, even if she’s not good in stand-up debates. That’s like dismissing Madame Defarges as ill-informed.
The argument she was trying to make has been made by many bright people and is the mirror of the progressive shibboleth about how more people have been killed by religion than any other cause. As a general sweeping historical simplicity, that argument can be blown away in five minutes, but it is still widely held by the uncritical because it contains a grain of insight into the dangerous and destructive power of religious fervor. Conversely, one really does hope one’s concentration camp guard is worrying about the “Thou Shalt Nots” he was taught in Sunday school and his prospects for eternal bliss. But the general argument that atheism leads to genocide also fails when you try to move from particular insight to law of history. It’s not a matter of right and wrong, but how important a role religion or its opposite play in a myriad of complex factors. It seems a better compromise is to agree that both anti-clerical totalitarianism and messianic theocracy brook no challenges and get very nasty when they surface.
Buckman’s vegetarian analogy wasn’t all that persuasive. I don’t recall reading about institutes and museums of vegetarianism in Nazi Germany. It’s one thing to defend atheism from a charge of inevitable genocide, quite another to dismiss the anti-religious side of Stalinism as happenstance or unforseen collateral damage.
“This is all fun, but I think you are all making a mistake in trying to reduce her with adjectives like “shallow” or “dishonest”. Would that she was. She is toxic by her combination of hate, absolute conviction and utter humourlessness (has anyone got a picture of this woman smiling?), but she is certainly not stupid, even if she’s not good in stand-up debates.”
Distinguo, dear boy. There’s a world of difference between “shallow” and “dishonest”, both of which she is, and “stupid”, which she emphatically is not.
OK, point taken. I guess my taste runs more to stupid, but deep people.
Stupid and Deep? Excellent. See my previous on stupidly nearly dying during a deep dive. You’re right at home.
I’m not convinced that Kathy is all that bright, actually. Have you ever seen anything remotely approaching analysis come from that quarter? It’s just a string of cliches from beginning to end.
That being said, I take Sarah N. Dippity’s point from another thread–in spite of myself, I’m starting to feel a bit sorry for her after her dismal TVO performance. Maybe she’s simply too easy a target, and we should all move on.
I don’t think she’s particularly bright – she’s just found a niche. But Peter taking exception to Dr. Robert Buckman’s (someone who IS particularly bright) argument is very telling (”carrots” was particularly inspired, I thought). And no, I don’t hope my concentration camp guard is thinking of “Thou Shalt Nots” and eternal bliss – because he can easily turn that around to “She’s in a better place now – Glory be to God” after he kills me.
No, I want my concentration camp guard to be thinking “Life is all there is, therefore, it is wrong of me to kill her”. It’d be nice if her thought torture was wrong, too, but apparently – it isn’t.
“I’m not convinced that Kathy is all that bright, actually. Have you ever seen anything remotely approaching analysis come from that quarter?.”
Not as a political thinker or social analyst, no. But thanks to James Bow, I have read Lobotomy Magnificat, and it’s (gulp) good poetry. Hate to admit it, but there’s an intelligence at work there.
No, she’s not stupid: you can tell by the way she phrases stuff to elicit just the right reaction. Dishonest, shallow, uninformed, hate-drenched, fearful – yes. But not stupid.
sooey, I don’t think there were too many KGB officers and commisars thinking “Glory be to God” in the Lubyanka and Ukraine. I think they tended to relax with a shot of vodka after a hard day and muse about how damnably hard it is to make omelettes without breaking eggs.
It’s one thing to defend atheism from a charge of inevitable genocide, quite another to dismiss the anti-religious side of Stalinism as happenstance or unforseen collateral damage.
Correlation is not causation. The idea is proposed that Stalin killed millions, if not in the name of atheism, at least because of it. Buckman’s reductio was quite apropos, I thought: if it’s silly to say that Hitler killed in the name of, or because of, vegetarianism, it’s equally silly to make a spurious point about Stalin’s atheism.
Correlation is not causation.
Oh, thanks. I’ll remember that the next time someone tries to blame the medieval pogroms on Christianity.
Peter:
You know better than that. Correlation is not causation–you can’t logically argue from one to the other–but that doesn’t mean that every correlation is an accident, either.
Stalin’s purges had nothing to do with atheism. Hitler’s mass-murder had nothing to do with carrots. But the mediaeval (and more recent) pogroms had something to do with religion, even if the latter is necessary but insufficient to explain the phenomenon.
Dr. Dawg:
Wanna step outside, eh? I’ll get back to you later on that. For now all I can say is that although no one could ever possible call you stupid, you can at times be very uninformed.
Well, don’t leave me hanging in suspense. Seems to me that you need to prove that Stalin’s purges were primarily aimed at the religious. Certainly some of the latter were swept up in the purges, but I’m afraid that politics, paranoia and democratic centralism were far more significant factors than belief in a Creator.
Enh. Uninformed, uninshwarmed. I’ve out-reasoned you, Peter.
“mediaeval (and more recent) pogroms had something to do with religion, even if the latter is necessary but insufficient to explain the phenomenon. ”
If we are talking about the pogroms against Jews particularly — then I think it really had more to do with greed than with religion. Sure – the ruling kings and Queens and nobility USED religion as an excuse — but the reality was, Jews were one of the only sources of capital — and there were many many kings and queens who benefited a great deal when having gone in debt up to their eyeballs to jewish bankers and money-lenders, stood to benefit by having these immense debts wiped out when the Pogroms against Jews took place. If your banker disapears, is run out of the country or is killed… you don’t have to worry about compound interest or any interest at all anymore.
There’s an amazing scene in Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” – I am going to go looking for the script and post it if I can find it.
Seems to me that you need to prove that Stalin’s purges were primarily aimed at the religious.
Dr. Dawg, we’re not in a lab here. I don’t know how many examples of 20th century revolutionary totalitarian regimes trying to crushing religion and the religious you need before you stop rotely repeating the correlation isn’t causation shibboleth, but if that is your test, then I don’t think you can make the case that pogroms were instrinsic to medieval Christianity. You won’t find one Vatican directive encouraging a pogrom, but you will find lots trying to stop them. So why is the connection in that case obvious to you, but not with Stalin and his like?