I call BS. This guy can not possibly see as far into the perpetrators as he claims to.That's kind of The Last Psychiatrist's shtick, right there.
The Special Rapporteur indicated that there had been contradictory decisions with regard to the honour defense in Brazil, and that legislative provisions allowing for partial or complete defense in that context could be found in the penal codes of Argentina, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Peru, Syria, Venezuela and the Palestinian National Authority.Honour killings are certainly not a uniquely 'Muslim' problem. If all Muslims in Canada magically disappeared, you wouldn't guarantee Canada would never see another honour killing.
Regardless of the original post, there is a debate going on in Canada about whether the Shafia murders were honor killings, or domestic violence. Since this gets at the (original, not post-hoc) motivation behind the murders, it's difficult to find enough evidence to draw firm conclusions. However, I think one useful thing to take from the Last Psychologist's piece is that the murders occurred when one of the daughters was going to leave, and that this fits in to the pattern of domestic violence, where women (usually) are most in danger of being killed by an abusive spouse when they leave or threaten to leave.Why is it an 'either or' thing? Can't be both? Certainly, it would seem like a case of "domestic violence" whenever parents/husbands kill their daughters/wives. The "Honor killing" thing comes into play when, I guess it's socially required by the rest of society that someone kill their family members. Since that can never happen in a western country, then by definition an "honor killing" could never happen.
When Nietzsche said "God is dead" he meant that God is not necessary for our morality anymore. When he says we killed God, he means that our science, skepticism, education, have pushed us past the point where believing in miracles is possible; but as a consequence of this loss we are lost, have no goals, no aspirations, no values. God was made up, but he gave us a reason to progress.And I think this quote from Grant makes clearer what TLP is pointing to; Religious, atheist and anti-theist alike will fall down, the failures of our modern society will repeat and repeat, overcoming this will only be achieved by those who overcome and elevate above revenge, "so that what what they accomplish comes forth from a positive love of the earth, and not simply from hatred of what presently is. Dynamic willing that has not overcome revenge will always have the marks of hysteria and hatred within it. It can only produce the technical frenzy of the nihilists or the shallow goals of the last men. It cannot come to terms with the questions 'what for, whither and what then?'"
The resulting nihilism requires us to either despair, return back to medieval religion, or look deeper within us and find a new source of human values.
Everybody uses the word 'values' to describe our making of the world: capitalists and socialists, atheists and avowed believers, scientists and politicians. The word comes to us so platitudinously that we take it to belong to the way things are. It is forgotten that before Nietzsche and his immediate predecessors, men did not think about their actions in that language. They did not think they made the world valuable but that they participated in its goodness.(George Grant, Time As History 1969)
What is comic about the present use of 'values', and the distinction of them from 'facts', is not that it is employed by modern men who know what is entailed in so doing; but that it is used also by 'religious' believers who are unaware that in its employment they are contradicting the very possibility of the reverence they believe they are espousing in its use. The reading of Nietzsche would make that clear to them.
To repeat: the thought of great thinkers is not a matter for the chit chat of television and cocktail parties; nor for providing jobs for academics in the culture industry. In it the fate of our whole living is expressed. In this sense, the thought of Nietzsche is a fate for modern men. In partaking in it, we can come to make judgements about the modern project - that enormous enterprise that came out of Western Europe in the last centuries and has now become worldwide.
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To illustrate: Nietzsche clearly uses the same language as the tradition in its eternal truth, when he says that the height for human beings is amor fati. Yet the love of fate which he would call redemption, is not in any sense a call to the passivity that some moderns falsely identify with words such as 'fate', or 'destiny'.
In him the love of fate is at one with his call to dynamic willing. The love of fate is the guarantee that dynamic willing shall be carried on by lovers of the earth, and not by those twisted by hatred and hysteria against the existing (however buried that hysteria may be in the recesses of our instincts).
This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.Our old mythic ways of understanding the world are the ice melting underneath us. The ice need not be supported by God, but something must support it, otherwise we face the cold, icy abyss beneath. Reason alone cannot protect us.
The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in;—and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place round them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular science evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.
For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature's portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation.
"the inventing of a reason for an attitude or action the motive of which is not recognized"
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posted by griphus at 1:42 PM on February 5 [7 favorites]