My novel: http://www.amazon.com/Walk-These-Broken-Roads-ebook/dp/B009RZYO2O/
My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/
My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini
Glorious Hat! http://www.commieobama.com/pages/hat_info.html
Love the Vampire Pt 2! http://www.staresattheworld.com/2013/03/accepting-vampires-for-whom-they-are/
Love the Vampire Pt 1! http://woodbetweenworlds.blogspot.com/2012/07/vampires-are-evil.html
Hat Tip: http://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/let-me-in/
Many years ago, when I still had the honorific corporal in front of my name, I was down in the United States at Fort Knox doing a joint military exercise with the Americans.
And they had us staying in these shacks, these two-story shacks with bedroom showers and whatnot, that were no longer authorized to have permanent residency in, but weren't condemned.
You know, you can have the Canucks stay there for a week or two or whatever.
And the reason for this was obvious as soon as we got inside.
As soon as you got up to the second story, you could actually feel the building shifting under your weight.
Particularly, if you went out on the balcony, you could feel the whole thing swaying the left and the right.
The building was just falling to pieces.
Which says sad things about the American military, quite frankly.
But the reason I bring this up is that I think this is a really great metaphor for where we find ourselves in the West.
The institutions, the society, is beginning to sway.
We can feel that the structural integrity is falling.
But the problem is, we don't really know why.
Now let's say this structure has an infestation of carpenter ants.
They've gone up into the beams, they're beating their holes through it, laying their nests.
The problem is, we long ago forgot our entomology.
Nobody can tell the carpenter ants apart from the regular black ants outside.
And so, nowadays, nowadays you've got these two groups.
You've got this one group, the liberals, who are shouting about how ants are fine, you need ants to eat all the dead insects on the lawn, how they're good for it, they're healthy for the environment.
And you've got this other group screaming about how ants are evil, ants need to be banished, we need to destroy all of them, the moral majority.
And both of them are absolutely idiotic, and it all boils down to the fact that they can't tell apart a regular ant from a carpenter ant.
We've got a lot of problems plaguing us in modern society.
Pornography, for instance.
But see, here's the thing.
Most people can't tell the difference between the kink.com people and the casting couch.
There's the video game thing, but again, video games are not all the same animal.
You've got something like Fallout New Vegas or Dragon's Age where it's got a lot of catharsis, complex plot, it's got some value to it.
And then you have something as empty and meaningless as Angry Birds or World of Warcraft.
Violence in cinema.
Violence in media.
This is a problem nowadays.
It's being celebrated in an orgiastic manner.
But to compare some schlock action movie to something like We Were Soldiers, or to mistake something like the hostile movies, to put them in the same category as something like Men Behind the Sun.
These are two different things.
They are completely different from the ground up.
They are more different than regular ants and carpenter ants.
And yet, the liberals defend all of it, and the moral majority condemns all of it, completely ignoring the fact that we've had violent stories in the past, except these had heroes in them.
They had plots.
It was justified.
These were saracens that we were fighting in these stories.
Unlike now, we just have this orgiastic violence in all of it.
The other day, I posted an article on my blog.
I'm going to link to it below.
I won't go into too many details.
It involves a webcomic, and to explain it, I'd have to tell you about the backstory of these characters and a whole bunch of Dungeon and Dragons nonsense because it's in that universe.
But essentially, people could not tell the difference in this comic between bullying prejudice on the one hand and righteous standards.
They couldn't understand why a righteous cleric would not make friends with the paladin.
They were make friends with a vampire.
A man with the same ethics as a paladin.
Rejected the vampire, rejected any negotiation with him.
They saw this as prejudiced, as cruel, as not accepting of others.
Perfect example of the problem we have nowadays.
Later that day, after writing that blog post, I watched the movie Let Me In, which is about evil.
And ironically, also about vampires.
Link down below to a review of the movie.
Absolutely brilliant.
I highly recommend the film.
It really explores the question of evil, discusses it, shows you what it is.
Because here's the thing, folks.
Evil does not, it's not a thing.
It's not something that you can point to.
There's the saying.
Most people think it's from the usual suspects or the devil's advocate.
The earliest reference to it was from the poet Baudelaire.
But the saying goes that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist.
Usually the people that say this are incredibly stupid.
But it's an interesting, interesting little statement.
You could just as easily say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that he did exist.
Because what's our modern conception of villainy?
Why don't we skip the discussion of these insane terrorists in the action movies, of these ugly monstrous killers in the torture porn, and you know, let's just go straight to Godwin's Law, Hitler.
Hitler, the most evil man who ever lived.
Who is also a conscientious vegetarian who liked animals, who was a very sensitive painter, and happened to kill millions of people and start a world war.
This is our modern conception of evil.
This ridiculous, black, vile, cruel, tyrannical sort of a thing.
And you know, maybe you can point to a few examples like that in history.
Stalin comes to mind.
But really, with your mundane evil, with your standard evil, it's not an evil person doing it.
It's a good person doing evil.
The thing about evil.
It's not seeking after evil.
The idea of the black priest that wants to kill babies because he wants to be more evil is pretty ridiculous.
That's not what 99% of evil looks like.
Evil is a man who wants to go buy something for his girlfriend, so he shoots a stranger and takes his wallet.
The evil is pursuing something good.
Evil is almost always pursuing something good.
Eating feels great.
Eating is necessary to survive.
But gluttony, when you completely give in to the obsession for this, that's when it becomes evil.
Drugs.
Drugs are not evil.
Despite what we tried prohibition.
The moral majority tried shoving prohibition down our throats.
What happened?
A whole bunch of alcohol overdoses, a bunch of gang violence.
Because they mistook the fact that although overconsumption, although addiction is evil, you're seeking after the good feeling you get from alcohol to the point where you destroy everything else in your life and can no longer afford alcohol.
They mistake that for the drugs.
So they say all alcohol is evil.
We've lost the ability to perceive the differences in things.
And this is where we get back to the liberalism, not being able to recognize that the vampire, in either of those stories, the D ⁇ D comic I talked about or the movie Let Me In, modern tolerance and liberalism cannot recognize that the vampire is evil, that this vampire is exploiting others.
They're drinking the blood of innocence to maintain their own corrupt existence.
And on top of that, anybody that comes into contact with the vampire winds up corrupting their own lives, becoming just as bad as a vampire.
Let's go back to this robber.
This robber comes from a disadvantaged home.
You know, had bad luck growing up.
You know, he needs to show off in front of this girl or else she's going to leave him for somebody flashier.
And he's really in love with this girl.
So he goes and robs a stranger.
So you or me, we call this out.
We say, no, this cocksucker is an evil son of a bitch.
He needs to be locked up.
He needs to be punished.
He needs to be caned.
This guy's not only a danger to society and he needs to be locked up, but he is a bad person and he needs punishment.
Where's your heart?
Why aren't you more tolerant?
You know, we all go through difficult times, and...
And you get to modern liberalism, where we can't even see evil for what it is.
We're looking for the devil.
We are looking for Hitler.
We're looking for Stalins, these big, ridiculous crime lords that apparently don't love their families and aren't nice to their dogs at the end of the day.
This cartoon super villainy.
And the result is that we can't call somebody evil when they're doing evil things.
Oh, charity's a part of it, of course.
None of us are perfect.
But that's the thing.
When you start to notice what evil is, that evil is just pursuing good things in the wrong way, you start to become far more critical about your own behavior, analyzing your own behavior.
Is what am I doing?
Is it right?
But these people, they don't analyze.
They know if they ever looked into their own souls that they'd find so much ugliness in there.
And so as soon as we start to critique somebody else, criticize somebody else for their choices, for their behaviors, all of a sudden, well, you know what?
I could be the next one on that list of people that are being shitty people.
And since they don't want to reform their behavior, since they don't want to atone or make amends, they just want to keep doing what they're doing.
They want to keep snorting the Coke, they want to keep skimming off the top, they want to keep lying, manipulating, just being these shitty, destructive people, the carpenter ants in the woodwork, They tell us we can't criticize the outright criminal.
And so this is why children's entertainment, children's cartoons, it can't have conflict.
It can't have violence in it.
And they dumb it all down.
So, instead of blood or death in children's cartoons, we have the Power Rangers.
Sparks flying with each ninja kick, nobody really gets hurt, the bad guy just explodes into fireworks at the end of each episode.
And so, we've got a generation of kids taught that people don't get hurt in fist fights, that violence is fun and cool with no consequences, but that standing up for something and actually going into combat because it's right even when you're afraid-well, they've never seen that their entire lives.
Just sparks flying.
Do a cool ninja kick.
This inability to call out evil when we see it, this inability to tell the difference between right and wrong, between carpenter ant and regular ant-this is one of the big things at the core of our modern dysfunction.
The opposite of discriminatory is being indiscriminate.
