SelwynDuke.com

The Truth about Obama’s Muslim “Faith”

By Selwyn Duke

Now that Barack Obama has decided to be for the Ground Zero mosque before being implicitly against it (perhaps), discussion about his faith has once again reached a fever pitch.  To many, his stance proves he’s a Muslim, with a recent poll showing that almost 20 percent of Americans hold that opinion; to others, it just reflects a desire to be faithful to the Constitution (now, that would be change).  The truth, however, is a bit more nuanced.  Obama is not religiously Muslim.  Culturally, though . . . well, that’s a different matter altogether.

Engineering Oblivion: Eugenics, the Remaking of Man and Unmaking of Morality

By Selwyn Duke

The year is 1941, and the Nazis are in the midst of their Lebensborn program. Men of pure Aryan stock — especially members of the Waffen-SS, thought the cream of the crop — have a special purpose. In many occupied countries, they are encouraged to mate with blonde-haired, blue-eyed women — those reflecting the very picture of the Aryan ideal themselves. And “mate” is the word; romance is not necessary here, nor marriage, nor moral constraints. For the program is to serve as a baby factory that will produce future Aryan supermen for the Third Reich.

Lebensborn grows out of what is central to the Nazi philosophy: eugenics, which is the improvement of the human race through the process of selective breeding. And the Nazis embrace it for a very interesting reason: They have a penchant for indulging ancient myths, and one of these is that they are descended from a race of Aryan supermen who lost their superhuman capabilities because they procreated with inferior races, thus visiting upon themselves a kind of biological devolution. And they aim to reverse the process by jump-starting and accelerating evolution in a sort of hothouse environment.

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Lack of Intellectualism is Losing the Marriage Debate

By Selwyn Duke

Judge Vaughn Walker's legal ruling striking down California's Proposition 8 certainly was no triumph of intellectualism. But while it's easy to thus dismiss it, what's usually forgotten is that reasoning such as his flies only in a certain cultural milieu -- a milieu that, in part, has been shaped by conservatives. Let's examine the matter. 

Walker's lack of intellectualism is profound. Among other things, he said that opposition to faux marriage was ultimately based on "moral disapproval." While this is a rhetorically compelling argument in an age where "morality" has become a dirty word, it is also nonsense. This is not because he is wrong in his understanding of marriage's more cerebral defenders; it is because he is wrong in his understanding of law. For the fact is that all credible legal proscriptions and prescriptions are a matter of "moral disapproval." Don't believe me? I'll explain.

Generation Zero

By Selwyn Duke

While I certainly look back with fondness on the “Greatest Generation,” I can’t help but think that the superlative applied to it may be unwarranted. They did weather the Great Depression and defeat the National Socialists, but they also greatly empowered international socialists. These would be people such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who gave the big-government ball American history’s hardest push and made constitutional trespass an art form. And then there is something else: If we believe the truest measure of a person is how he raises his children, we should note that WWII-era Americans gave us Generation Zero.

This is a term coined by those who gave us the new documentary Generation Zero. Produced by David Bossie of Citizens United Productions and directed by Stephen Bannon, the work examines the causes of our financial crisis. But it is no plain-vanilla, statistics-addled snoozefest, as it looks beyond the usual one-dimensional political and economic explanations to that deeper realm: the moral. And, as its title suggests, its makers place the blame for the crisis squarely on the shoulders of the Baby Boomer generation — or, should I say, degeneration — which shed tradition and virtue at a rate theretofore unseen in American history.

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