FAO Schwarz: Retail Lunactivism

Lunactivism, my faithful readers know, is some protest, statement, or direct action in support of a cause that does the cause more harm than good. Terrorism is an extreme example. The fear-mongering Prop 8 commercial portraying Mormons as home invaders is another.

In a commercial venture, companies have over the last several years begun touting their environmental friendliness. It's thought that appearing green enhances corporate image, which is especially important to retailers and consumer-facing businesses.

Now, hardly anybody or anything has more good will than Santa Claus, and most people have a fixed image of Santa Claus involving, on some level, a red suit.

So F.A.O. Schwarz, struggling retailer, decided that turning Santa's suit green to push a children's book was the right way to go. Lunactivism? I report, you decide.

w/t Debbie Schlussel

Sphere: Related Content

When Smart People Have Bad Ideas

Lunactivism meets geek: Blackle, as the name suggests, is an effort to SaveThePlanet™ by having a search page that uses a black background. Clue in, fellas: one of the reasons Google was successful is that their screen was visually appealing. Yours is just plain ugly. Eye-averting, skin-crawlin', get-me-away-from-here ugly.

Sphere: Related Content

Lunactivists Take Part in Easter Mass

From Moe Lane of Redstate and the Gateway Pundit comes this poor use of of leverage: six adult brats disrupt a Catholic Mass in Chicago on Easter Sunday. I don't care why, and hesitate even to say "Iraq war", because they don't deserve it. The important part to me is that they were there to compain about something the Church and probably the congregation is against, to gain for themselves some measure of attention.

This has all of the elements of lunactivism, all rolled into a nice little package.

They call it "raising awareness", but it's an attention-getting device no different than a toddler's temper tantrum.

The setting chosen for the idiocy ensured the brats' phyical safety.

They wasted leverage. Catholic Mass, like almost all church services, is open to everyone, and a disruption like theirs was sure to result in blog stories like this one. I feel dirty and ill-used even giving them the attention they were after, but I feel compelled to note the absurdity of it all.

The lunactivism is shown most clearly because they were preaching to the choir: most of the cathedral goers are probably against the war, but the act of lunacy drives a wedge between the activists and their audience. All of the worshippers were aware of the war. were The only awareness they raised was a negative perception about those opposing it.

And guess what: despit the best efforts of anti-war leftists in Congress and nursery schools, Iraq is becoming a country again: it's own country, not ruled by a thug and not run by our enemies. In time, we will leave there, too. But for now, our armed forces are giving terrorism a bad name in Iraq.

And so there is this from Michael J. Totten:


Meanwhile, "Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War" and the Illinois Coalition for Peace and Justice are giving anti-war activism a bad name in America.

Sphere: Related Content

Taking a Break

Due to heavy time commitments, I'm taking a break from heavy political and philosophical blogging. I'll still post quick comments here, but no proper essays unless something really rips my toga.

I wish I had time to devote to the foolhardy decision by Columbia to allow Iran's head waiter Ahmadinejad to propagandize them. It's bad enough that having the U.N. on our soil forces us to entertain our enemies, but to give him a platform is just silly. It's a fine example of lunactivism, since it's the logical extension of the idea that people won't hate us if we just listen to them. They have to do it for consistency with their ideals, but they don't realize how it makes them look: complicit with his goals of destroying Israel and the US.

When full blogging resumes, look for comments in places such as IMAO, Redstate, The Minority Report, and the other blogs I troll.

Sphere: Related Content

They Don't Need to Retract

In what can only be described as lunactivism, the 88 faculty members at Duke University who signed a letter assigning guilt to the Lacrosse team have refused to retract it, or even to issue an apology for their excessive zeal. It's a wonderful example of idealistic fervor trumping good sense.

Anyone can jump the gun and be wrong. Why not just say "Oops, sorry for ruining your lives!" and be done with it? This case, and in particular the faculty lynch mob, will give fuel to the anti-PC fire for years to come. An apology would have done a lot to douse that flame.

At The Minority Report blog, Daveinboca has a piece up about the Duke Lacrosse case. I don't call it the "Duke Rape Case", because the only people raped in that case were, figuratively speaking, the accused.

Why don't the Duke faculty need to apologize and issue a retraction of their infamous letter assigning guilt to the Lacrosse team? In a comment there, I said:

In their minds, they were right. It's the facts that were wrong, but only because this case was either A) an aberration or B) proof that rich White kids can do what they want.

Some of them in B) have it figured that the rich and powerful pulled strings and got the case to turn out how they wanted.

Others in A) are unhinged in a slightly different direction: they think that even though these particular rich White kids were put through the ringer this time, the justice system is still lopsided in their favor and it's only fair, because the academics just know this kind of thing happens to poor Blacks all the time.

No, it doesn't. While it may be true that the system is rigged against the poor, politicians don't pin their reelection hopes on prosecuting a particular set of poor Black defendants, or at least not on the basis that they're poor and Black.

Our legal system is biased in favor of the rich and powerful, but the bias is more heavily against the passive. Those who will fight the system, make noise, and do whatever they can to protest an injustice against them (whether justice is actually on their side or not) often will be rewarded, while those who roll over and accept their fate (deserved or not) will be punished.

Sphere: Related Content

More Lunactivism

In my previous post on lunactivism I should have defined it: activism taking positions which are harmful to a central cause, usually from a desire to appear ideologically consistent.

Most lunactivists are liberals who get sidelined by the search for the approbation of a good cause defended, and fail to sanity check their own actions. Liberals tend to believe that integrity entails always "speaking truth to power" on every issue, where truth is whatever they feel and power is whichever tradition or institution they wish at the moment to destroy. Lunactivism occurs when activists get carried away with excitement over side issues, overreach, or choose the wrong fellow travelers.

My favorite early blogger, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Means: you don't have to conform for the sake of conformity, either in fashion or in substance. And if your zeal for conformance to the logical implications of an ideology puts you someplace doing something that you know is wrong, then you probably ought to reconsider that ideology, or at least your own zeal.

As part of the Law of Unintended Consequences, there is always a backlash against activism of any kind. The activism can be seen to be lunactive if negative consequences exceed the progress toward the intended goal.

Conservatives are also guilty of lunactivism, though on nothing like the same scale. I mention two examples below, and there may be others. Some examples of lunactivism:

Animal Rights

• Wanting to kill the baby animal who loses its mother, because growing up around humans is a fate worse than death.
• Not allowing human predation (so more animals suffer longer)

NAACP

Abortion is the leading cause of African American deaths, yet the NAACP supports it because that's the ideologically correct liberal position.

Anti-War activists

In 2006, opposition to the Iraq war led liberal anti-war activists to support Ned Lamont for Senator in Connecticut, eventually defeating Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary. Lieberman, however, is among the most liberal of Democrats on most issues, but happens to support the Iraq war. So the activists spent all of their effort to unseat a popular liberal Senator in a liberal State, a "safe seat", only to have him win the general election as an Independent.

This Spring (2007), Harvard College Democrats displayed on the school quadrangle 3,200 red bandannas "to visually illustrate the sheer magnitude of what Iraq has become", according to a piece in The Crimson.
"Unfortunately for the Dems, their Iraq display in the Quad looks nothing like a memorial for the lost soldiers and civilians in Iraq."

Prior to their installation of the Iraq Awareness Display, the Dems held a Candlelight Vigil at Tercentenary Theater. There were also a number of projects undertaken to physically support the troops (a phrase we invoke, but often don’t act upon), including a donation drive they co-sponsored with the Harvard Republican Club and ROTC. In other words, the Iraq Awareness Project was a series of solidly forward-thinking events. But the display–well that’s a prime example of how progressives lose focus at Harvard.

When Confronted By Contrary Opinion

Students at college campuses from Columbia to Berkeley have begun raising such a fuss against anyone who disagrees with the leftward agenda that they silence any contrary voice, often with violence and the explicit denial of the right to free speech.

The Sicko

By gushing over the wonders of the Cuban health care system, Michael M0ore undercuts his own message by choosing a tyrant as a fellow traveler. Viewers will draw the implication that America must emulate Cuba's totalitarianism if it is to achieve good health care.

Multiculturalism

Multiculty is an inherently contradictory dogma, which says that all cultures are to be valued and preserved, even ones which deny basic human rights. This principle trumps religious freedom, free speech, women's rights, and just about everything else when it comes to Islam. Liberals ignore the hatred pouring from the mosques, as well as the fact that Islam and liberal ideology simply do not mix.

As the Vanishing American put i:

Somehow liberal Christians and secular liberals and leftists alike believe that anyone who suffers or is 'oppressed' even if by their own fault is automatically to be exalted. This is what is at the core of the leftist/liberal reverence for the 'Other', the stranger, the outcast, the invader.

AIDS and Abstinence

Gay Pride and liberal correctness mean that abstinence is anathema. Even though abstinence education has proven effective against the spread of AIDS, activists will have nothing of it.

Fox News

Debates: Fox has a bigger audience than any other cable news outlet, and boycotting them only hurts the candidates in their efforts to become known.

O'Reilly boycott: Bill O'Reilly is not a conservative. He's a populist who explicitly distances himself from many conservative positions. Yet lunactivists are staging a boycott. Why? Could it be because O'Reilly points out the disproportionate and controlling influence of Moveon.org and George Soros on the Democratic Party?

Global Warming

The "Climate Crisis" and the Union of Concerned Scientists:

The UCS doesn't understand that their advocacy, following as it does a pattern of liberal orthodoxy, detracts from the authority their voice would otherwise have. People notice the pattern, and think "Oh, it's them again."

Vigilante Killing of Abortionists

Though it hasn't happened for about 10 years, right-wing anti-abortionists have murdered doctors who perform abortions. Again, this is taking ideology to the extreme, committing acts that are wrong and justifying them by the logical implications of ideology. The backlash against these killings continues today, typically in an application of the ad hominem tu quoque fallacy ("And what of you?").

Traitors and Criminals

Finally, as Becker points out at Redstate.com, it is a misuse of language to call anti-war politicians "traitors". Contrarily, saying that the Iraq war is illegal and that the Administration is "criminal" is equally wrong. That kind of hyperbole does more harm than good. "Treason" and "criminal" have specific meanings, and throwing these words around without carefully considering those definitions is crying wolf. It allows the object of the name-calling to generalize and blur the lines, so that in the future some real traitor or criminal may go unpunished.

Sphere: Related Content

Lunactivism Kills Bambi

As usual, Eric at Classical Values provokes thought with his post on deer in the headlights and the lunactivists who keep them there. Commenting, I noted

It is difficult to engage in rational discussion with people for whom humans and non-humans have equal (or comparable and in within an order of magnitude) value.

If you ask people which would be a greater crime, killing 10 deer or killing one human, most would answer that killing one human is worse. The "stop the killing" lunactivist in your post would have to ponder it, and probably come up with the wrong answer.

I really don't know how to stop them, or even how to engage them. They derive tremendous emotional and even spiritual value from standing against the status quo, shaking their little fists against what they see as the teeming hordes of Evil, those of us who draw a value distinction between human and non-human.

To me, the value of animal life and human life is not comparable. (Yes, I know humans are animals, too; unless I specify, you can be assured that I always use "animal" to mean non-human animal, or those aspects of biology which distinguish humans and non-humans from spinach or quartz. ) What I mean is that other things being equal, I would accept the immediate extinction of deer (or any non-human species) if it meant saving one human life, even for a moment.

Of course, things are not equal, and the extinction of even one species of deer would have a cost in human life, and an impact on ecosystems that would in turn have unknown, and largely negative, effects on humans. So, the pathologically absurd situation I posed above would at some point involve a dilemma in which human life could be balanced against human life.

But back in the real world, burgeoning deer populations spill over into areas occupied by people and their vehicles. Deer, lacking the evolutionary foresight to be constructed from sturdier materials, meet their inevitable end more quickly than either their Creator or we their predators would have liked. In the process they do a great amount of damage to property, and indeed, cost human lives.

So the overabundance of deer, as well as their total absence, would be a net negative for humans. Deer are good, when their numbers are great enough to be stable but not so great as to cause problems for themselves (by the lack of food and space) or us (by trying to use ours).

But the animal rights crowd will have nothing of that, because they don't see the distinction between humans and animals. Despite efforts to deny it, the notion that non-humans have their own innate rights, rather than drawing their protection from our need to regulate our behavior, leads inexorably to devaluing humans. So instead of stopping at criticizing those who engage in the cruelty of dog-fighting or other ways to have fun hurting animals, they engender overpopulation, disease, and harm to the creatures they ostensibly wish to help.

Like all attempts to deny reality, attempting to keep people from using animals for food is doomed to failure.

Stay tuned here for more on lunactivists, their antics, and their intractable nature.

Sphere: Related Content