BC more politically diverse than students think, study suggests

Dustin Boehlke scrunched his eyebrows and paused for a moment before filling in the blank pie charts in front of him. He had just completed a survey on student political views at Bellevue College and was now filling in his guesses as to what the results of the study would be. “Tolerance is probably a little bit bigger,” he said as he etched in the pie-chart on BC student value priorities, given a choice between tolerance, freedom and traditional morality. He filled in about 65 percent as being for tolerance.

In reality, of the 85 students polled for the survey, only 19 percent claimed tolerance trumped the other two options. Boehlke had wrongly guessed that most students at BC were “progressive liberals,” when in actuality, the outcome of the polling data seems to suggest that student political sympathies tend to be more libertarian and conservative than liberal. He wasn’t alone in his misperception however; 85 percent of the students polled felt that most people at BC are liberal.

The survey questionnaire posed four multiple-choice questions to students that focused on their views of human nature, equality, values and government. The fifth question asked students what group, between liberals, conservatives and libertarians, they thought was most prevalent on campus. Though the overwhelming majority guessed liberal, most BC students appear to be libertarians, with conservatives just slightly outnumbering liberals.

After being showed the results, students tended to offer two different explanations for the results. Many felt that the methodology was lacking in many regards. “That’s not a big enough sample-size” said Erin Hoffman, the news editor for “The Watchdog.” Hoffman added that many of the questions forced students into choosing between false dichotomies, and that some of the answers contained hidden biases. Giulia Balzola was particularly concerned about the second question, which asked students to decide whether people are capable of achieving ideal solutions to problems or are fundamentally flawed and resistant to change. Designed to emulate Thomas Sowell’s “constrained” and “unconstrained” visions of human nature that form the basic differences between liberals and conservatives, Giulia felt that the answers didn’t frame the different perspectives properly. “The first answer is addressing social and external problems the people could be able to solve. The second answer is saying the people have problems themselves. I think this answer does not exclude the first one.”

Balzola didn’t say the study was completely wrong though. “Most people on this campus aren’t actually liberal. They’re faking it. I’m a real liberal and I know what it means to be liberal.” She added that perhaps students felt that they had to say they were liberal, even if they weren’t. Other students expressed similar sentiments, and added that this was partially due to the dominance of a progressive-liberal culture that punishes people who step out of line. “I don’t even talk to [minority students] on campus anymore,” said one conservative student who asked to remain anonymous. “I don’t have anything against them, I just don’t want to get in trouble if I say something that gets interpreted the wrong way.” Other students and staff members echoed the feelings of isolation, including Joan LeBeau, the president of BC’s College Republicans. “You feel like an island sometimes,” she said.

The term to describe this fear of retaliation which leads to isolation is “pluralistic ignorance.” Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker explained the concept in an interview with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, saying that “if dissenters are punished and can anticipate they’re going to be punished, then you might have a situation where no one actually believes something, but everyone believes that everyone else believes it, therefore no one is willing to be the little boy that says ‘the emperor is naked.’” According to Pinker, BC wouldn’t be alone if the pluralistic ignorance hypothesis proves to be true. “It’s the University[s] that imposes more stringent restraints on speech than society at large…and this pluralistic ignorance, as it’s sometimes called, is easily implemented when you have the punishing or censoring of unpopular views.”

Boehlke has good reason to fear punishment: he was threatened with sanctions from the school administration earlier in the quarter after making a Harlem Shake video that was deemed to be offensive, and was then accused of intimidating others when he tried to apologize to the offended student. “Is this people around BC? Because it seems like…that’s not what I see in people.” For Boehlke and for many others, the discovery that tolerance and progressive-liberal culture isn’t as nearly as prevalent as most students imagine could have profound implications. “Definitely publish this. It would be interesting to see what people think about it.”

Debating Animal Testing

I participated in my first recorded online debate over the course of the last week. While there are definitely things I think I could improve on, I think I made the case for my side about as strong as I could, given the time constraints. I actually feel somewhat guilty for not being a vegetarian and for wearing leather on occasion. The opposition, in my opinion, is actually a technically better debater, but it's hard to defend a motion in a debate tournament funded and organized by a group (PETA) with vested interest in the other side winning.

A brief teaser (my second of three videos):

The entire playlist of 5 videos is available here. All together, the whole debate is 17 minutes long.

Defending Margaret Thatcher

April 22, 2013

Perhaps the corollary to the old truism that “well-behaved women rarely make history” is that women who make history rarely go without being accused of not behaving well enough. One could hardly say she was “ill-behaved,” but former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher certainly has enemies that will say so, as the weeks after her death have tastelessly shown.

Within hours of her passing on April 8, detractors of the conservative Thatcher began playing “Ding dong the witch is dead,” as sung by Julie Garland from the Wizard of Oz, all across Britain. By April 11, the song reached number one on the iTunes download chart and it seemed to be on the climb towards hitting number one on the singles chart.

It was at this point that the British Broadcasting network BBC was faced with a dilemma. The increasing popularity of the song as well as incessant requests from listeners demanded that the insulting song be played over the airwaves. Conversely, conservative listeners pressed for the song to be banned to honor their former leader. It’s only proper, after all.

What to do?

Why not start by referencing the principles of one of the greatest British leaders of the last century—Margaret Thatcher. After all, not every public servant gets an entire style of politics named after them. What was “Thatcherism” all about? According to her Chancellor of the Exchequer (not unlike an economic cabinet advisor to the American president) Nigel Lawson, described it as a focus on “free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, 'Victorian values,' privatisation and a dash of populism.”

“Victorian values” is a broad term, and could be interpreted in a variety of ways, but it doesn’t seem to be much of a stretch to take some of the great British philosophical contributions from beneath its canopy. With consideration for the works of two of the greatest and most value-oriented English writers in the nation’s history—John Milton and John Stuart Mill—the task of banning music critical of Thatcher, however crude, becomes self-defeating. It would be a betrayal of the enlightenment values of free expression, to which England has had such a proud history of contributing and upholding. Add a dash of populism to the equation and it becomes an overt insult to Thatcher’s convictions, the very ones the ban-supporters are, ostensibly, trying to defend.

Ultimately, and thankfully, BBC chose not to ban the song. We can’t speak for the dead, but if Margaret Thatcher would support the allowance of this kind of immature criticism, she wouldn’t be alone. At the United Nations conference last year, President Barack Obama addressed a similar problem with the “Innocence of Muslims” film. “It was a crude and disgusting video,” he said, but banning the video was not the right solution. “As president of our country and commander in chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day. And I will always defend their right to do so…The strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression. It is more speech; the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy, and lift up the values of understanding and mutual respect.”

Of course, it is not always easy to hear such vicious criticism of someone you admire, but the best way to support your heroes is to stand for their values, and the right to criticize is certainly one that Thatcher used and stood for. If some people still worry that the "Iron Lady" will be turning over in her grave at the disrespectful aftermath of her death, Thatcher will always have her immortal response: "You turn if you want to. That lady's not for turning."

Toronto's "Misogynists and White-Supremacists"

April 15, 2013

Sometimes it is difficult to see where our biases blind us, but occasionally, some group will brazenly step into the spotlight and enlighten us all with a dazzling display of self-righteous stupidity. This isn’t solely entertainment; they’re powerful moments that we should use as an opportunity to reevaluate our own perspectives on important issues. Toronto, in a strange and twisted series of events, has again provided us with just such a “learning experience.”

On April 4, Dr. Katherine Young and Dr. Paul Nathanson came to the University of Toronto to hold a panel discussion they called “From Misogyny and Misandry to Intersex Dialogue.” Both doctorates in religious studies, the pair have co-written three books hoping to help spread awareness about a type of problem that another mob-targeted speaker at Toronto University, Dr. Warren Farrell, had spoken about in November of last year: problems facing men. It is an increasingly worrying subject, one that was even broached here at Bellevue College last year by Dr. Bernard Franklin.

But alas, we are told that such talk derails society’s attention from “the real issues,” the important issues (read “the ones facing women”). In fact, the very idea of bringing up men’s issues—the problems of boys failing in school, of men dying early, of ending up in prison at alarming rates, of increased alcoholism and five times higher rates of suicide than women—the mere mention of such problems, we are told, is tantamount to hating women. Apparently, the presence of evil Men’s Rights Advocates was serious enough to warrant an attempt to shout down the speakers so that no one could hear the presentation. When that failed, pulling the fire-alarm to more firmly impede opposing ideas seemed necessary. “The so-called men’s-rights movement is simply an alliance of misogynists, white-supremacists and people who aren’t very connected to reality, who have no real desire to make a positive change in society,” explained one of the calmer students at the rally outside Dr. Nathanson and Dr. Young’s discussion. “It blames feminism and the advancement of women for the problems of men in the world.”

In a sense, this is true. Almost all of feminism theory hinges on this thing called “the patriarchy.” The patriarchy, we are told, is the system in every society in which men systematically maintain their own power and influence at the expense of women. In the words of feminist and political theorist Carole Pateman, “the patriarchal construction of the difference between masculinity and femininity is the political difference between freedom and subjection.” Feminism views sex through the dichotomizing eyes of Marx and Engels, in which “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles…in a word, oppressor and oppressed…”

This dichotomizing belief is not merely untrue; it’s genuinely harmful. If we define power as the ability to control your own life, men are constrained by a similar set of gender-norms, and these come from the demands of survival, not from ‘male dominance.’ Men and women have held different roles due to biolgoical differences, not because of self-perpetuating exploitation. Falsely believing that men actively oppress women fosters hate and contempt in place of understanding and compassion.

Similarly, the now commonplace idea that women live in a “rape culture”—a society in which rape is accepted, excused or even condoned—is absolutely wrong. When the media attempted to give a different perspective on the recent Steubenville rape case, for example, they were (rightfully) vilified and denounced en masse. Their judgment and commentary was clearly not normal or accepted by the general public, nor should it be.

Incidentally, this brings us back to Toronto, where women can imagine what a rape culture might actually look like through the eyes of men. Four days before Dr. Young and Dr. Nathanson’s presentation, a 19-year old man was gang-raped by 4 women in a parking lot. The National Post quoted Detective Constable Thomas Ueberholz saying “…it is not completely unusual for a male to be the victim of a sexual assault.” In the same article, Nicole Pietsch of the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crises Centres said “other men will say for example, ‘Oh, he’s so lucky,’ like that was actually a positive thing.” Is someone who sympathizes with the plight of this 19-year old man really a sexist racial supremacist?

I would say that the protesters are exposing their sham ideology for what it is, but don’t take my word for it. Watch the videos of the protesters and decide for yourself which side appears to be more rational and open to different views.

New CDC Study Won't Change Minds on Vaccines

April 8, 2013

Purity, sanctity and self-righteousness are normally the attributes of the moral compass we associate with the reactionary right—religious zealots and gun toting, flag-waving ideologues who battle against science and reason. But are moral crusades solely a project of crazy conservatives?

“Left and right are like yin and yang,” said the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in an interview with the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. “Morality binds and blinds, and when a group circles around sacred objects and sacred values, they then give up the possibility of thinking clearly about whatever they’ve sacralized. It’s easy to see this on the right…but what’s harder to see is that people on the left, if you know what they hold sacred, you can see where they deny science too.” The idea of purity, usually sexual purity, is arguably one of the more visible and harmful sacred values held by the right, but purity of what we put in our bodies has become a similarly powerful ideology on the side of the left.

To be clear, the issue is not scientifically rigorous studies on nutrition or toxins in our foods, but assumptions about the inherent goodness of “naturalness.” To illustrate how wrong this idea is, I want you to try to keep a straight face and ignore the thousands of natural toxins like cyanide and arsenic for the moment and instead consider influenza. It is perfectly natural for people to die to this virus; 18,000 people did just that during the 2009-2010 flu season and thousands more will do so by the end of Spring this year.

The flu vaccine, developed in the 1940s, is decidedly unnatural by contrast, but while we’re comparing, it’s hard to ignore the numbers. The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, before the vaccine, killed between 50 and 100 million people. The first major flu outbreak after the vaccine, the Asian Flu of 1957, killed only around one million people.

So here we have one example of something “impure” saving tens of millions of people from something destructively pure and natural. But that’s not enough to stop the moral crusade against vaccines, a movement based on a fraudulent article published in 1998 in the British medical journal “The Lancet” that falsely linked the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine with autism.

The main worry rose from an ingredient called thimerosal, a mercury-containing compound used as a preservative in some vaccines. Though the arguments against thimerosal were arguments on correlational—not causal—links, their proponents conveniently ignored the fact that thimerosal was removed from most vaccines in 2001. Rates of autism subsequently continued to rise. An actual link between the levels of mercury in a shot, about one eighth the amount in an average tuna-sandwich, and autism was never established.

Deplorably, the article wasn’t retracted because of its unscientific nature, though it was eventually retracted in 2010 after it was revealed that the author of the article, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, was receiving money from a local firm looking to sue the vaccination company. But that didn’t stop the righteous moral majority of health puritans from continuing their crusade against dangerous vaccines. The powerful anti-vaccination movement has recruited doctors, parents of children with autism and even celebrities like Jim Carrey. More than a year and a half after the “Lancet” article was retracted, a Sept. 2011 poll by Thomas Reuters-NPR found that more than a quarter of Americans still had serious concerns about the safety of vaccines.

On March 29, 2013, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention released the findings of a recent study that definitively showed that “there is no relationship between vaccines containing thimerosal and autism rates in children.” Sadly, we can probably assume that this won’t do much to change the minds of those who have staked out their sacred ground in the natural and the pure, however unfounded and harmful their beliefs may be. Just as bloggers and activists like Christina England responded to critics of the anti-vaccine movement Penn and Teller by calling them “chauvinistic” and describing their arguments as feeble and bullying while conveniently ignoring the arguments themselves, we need only set our watches and wait for the righteous crusaders to claim that the CDC studies are biased or that the people who point out these inconvenient facts are somehow bad people.

Before we can jump to solving grand problems like global warming, everyone, no matter their political tendencies, has to let go of the idea that their party or side has a monopoly on truth and take our stances based on facts and ideals, not emotions and ideologies. Whether American society can pull together and figure out how to rid ourselves of something as easy and straightforward as the flu might very well be a litmus test for whether solving much more complex issues is even possible.

"What is offense, really?"

Credit: Game-Over-Custom, DeviantArt.com

I wrote that very question rhetorically in a rather lengthy rant against college speech codes back in November of last year, with the implied answer being that they were subjective. After taking several brain science courses, including cognitive and physiological psychology, it occurred to me that this question actually remains remarkably unanswered. A quick library database search found no scientifically rigorous books on the phenomenon of "offence," though I'm quite sure we can all agree it is a very real experience indeed, with equally real consequences.

My prima facie hypothesis on the nature of offence is essentially that it is the limbic system's response to perceived threats to an individual's or an individual's family's or group's social status (the 3rd and 4th tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs). Basic behavioral biology and game theory would easily explain why both our offence triggers and reactions are so varied and malleable. It could even explain why a soccer player would headbutt another player over a yo-mamma joke.

I've emailed by psychology professors and asked Reddit if there are current scientific paradigms about the experience of offence. If that fails (and given the remarkable lack of material online about the subject, it seems likely), I'll see if I can figure out a way to test my hypothesis and answer some of the following questions:

1. What is the substance of offence? Is it related to the limbic system, or to particular chemicals?

2. What are the physiological symptoms (if any) of the experience of taking offence?

3. Is taking offence in any way comparable to the experience of physical pain?

4. What are the most common and reliable triggers of offence? Are there universal triggers?

5. What is the evolutionary explanation for the phenomenon of taking offence?

6. How easy is it to change, eliminate, or impose offensive triggers?

7. Are there some things we should be offended by? Some things we are, but shouldn't be?

Given the political and legal importance of not hurting people's feelings in today's society, it is intriguing that these questions don't appear to have been subjected to serious scientific inquiry. The answers, particularly to questions 3, 4, and 6, are ones we really should have or at least be discussing when talking about issues of free speech, bullying, and related legal issues of a subjective nature.

The Political Correctness Screw Makes Another Turn

March 11, 2013

Pop tarts are dangerous—or at least they seemed that way to faculty at Park Elementary School in Baltimore and ended up as such for 7-year-old Josh Welch. He was suspended for two days after shaping his toaster-pastry into an approximate gun-shape; the school’s official letter said the “student used food to make an inappropriate gesture.”

Before you laugh—or cry—ask yourself if it would be more or less absurd if it had been a college student who was suspended for chewing a Danish into a sideways ‘L’ and saying “bang.”

Additionally, imagine that instead of shooting imaginary bullets with a pop tart, the college student had made a YouTube dance video based on the viral “Harlem Shake” meme. Such was the case for several students in student programs, who put a video of themselves, gyrating hips and all, on YouTube. Apparently the clip was “offensive” to certain staff members; it was promptly removed from YouTube and the students who participated had to write letters of apology about the incident to the assistant dean of student programs. Everyone in Student Programs has maintained a tight-lipped silence about the whole issue, since, as one member put it, “it’s no longer in [our] hands…we want to protect the student’s due process in case it becomes a bias incident.”

Wait, apologies for what? How can they get in trouble for a YouTube video? Why is this bad, even supposing it was as offensive as it has been portrayed? No one is forcing anyone else to go watch a video. There are countless YouTube videos that are far more disgusting than a Harlem Shake redux, videos that I choose not to watch because they bother me. I don’t ask for them to be removed; I just don’t watch them. Is that so hard?

The problem is two-fold. First of all, an extraordinarily large part of our society has been convinced that people have a right not to be offended. This is most tellingly proven by our own school’s bias incident policy. A bias incident, for those who aren’t familiar, is “conduct, speech, or behavior motivated by prejudice or a bias toward another person that does not rise to the level of a crime.” These are inherently subjective standards, of course. I might be offended by non-organic food, or by petroleum-based products or any number of other things but that doesn’t give me a right to take away other people’s rights to use these things. Like shooting pop tart guns, creating a less-than-perfectly politically correct video for YouTube is a “victimless crime.” Or, to be more accurate, is simply “victimless.”

Riding off of this non-existent right, the second part of the problem is that people have become convinced—sometimes even taught!—that they are victims. I’ll never forget interviewing a student earlier this quarter who said that another student had made him “feel inferior,” by bumping him in passing when the other student was trying to walk away from a verbal altercation. This sentiment is only reinforced by Bellevue College, which claims in its “Don’t Let the Haters Win” pamphlet that, “The college’s highest concern is for the emotional and physical well being of a person affected by a bias-motivated incident…” Really? I would have thought it would be education. I certainly can’t speak for everyone, but I think it’s more than a little condescending that the school wants to protect me from having my feelings hurt, and I say this as someone who has been verbally attacked solely on the base of my race and gender. I can take care of myself, thanks, and I’m paying for an education, not for therapy.

Part of growing up is learning to live with other people, people who look differently, talk differently, think differently and find different things humorous. If people didn’t hear this as a child, it’s never too late to learn the old adage, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” It would be one thing if students were jumping out of the screen and attacking people, but we walk a dangerous line in imposing “our” idea of what’s appropriate or inappropriate on others. What would the school do, I wonder, if someone claimed to be offended or hurt by these inescapable policies? The claim of offense at unconstitutional rules would certainly be more justified than someone claiming offense over a YouTube video they could just as easily not watch.

Remember, the Medium is the Message

March 4, 2013

The student rally at Olympia last week was great. We all met with legislators and their assistants and appeared to make generally positive impressions. They seemed to agree with us about the importance of putting more money into colleges and universities, or at least not making any additional cuts. We made lots of noise, we endured the cold, windy weather and most importantly, enjoyed some great boxed lunches together. One of our most important tasks, however, was to send a solid, coherent and true message to the people in charge of our state’s budget, and while Bellevue College and the rest of the schools present didn’t do a terrible job, we certainly could have done better.

First and most importantly, choosing your friends is as important a job in lobbying as it is in the realm of the more mundane social sphere. Note to lobbyists, anarchists are not your friends. Nothing sends the message, “Money spent on us is money wasted,” stronger than dressing up as and acting like the Irish Republican Army on the steps of the state capital. Even if BC students weren’t wearing the black bandanas and balaclavas themselves, waving black flags and distributing literature advocating “plundering” from the establishment, accompanied with sinister lines about how “cops aren’t invincible in the street,” standing in solidarity with this kind of company is bad. Very bad. To give you an idea, the website of the group that was distributing this literature was bragging just last week about the number of security cameras they destroyed. Associations with groups like this not only empowers them, but also undermines the agenda and goals of the more high-minded students trying to make good things happen. Taking part in a parade led by these people is something BC should avoid repeating in the future, for both pragmatic and moral reasons.

Secondly, metaphors and   symbols are an important part of communication. The Princeton psychology professor and famed author Julian Jaynes even went so far as to say that metaphor “is the very constitutive ground of language.” According to Jaynes, even basic words like “is,” and “to be,” are metaphors derived from Sanskrit: asmi, “to breathe,” and bhu, “to grow,” respectively. So what kind of message was a parade of students marching around with a 10 foot tall ball and chain supposed to send? Or a giant sign that read, “EDUCATION IS A HUMAN RIGHT?”  As it turns out, the enormous black ball was supposed to represent student debt, and the sign was supposed to represent a kind of obligation on the part of the legislators that they weren’t fulfilling.

Unfortunately, there are three problems with this image. Most obviously, education is not a human right, and even if it were, there are plenty of ways to educate oneself without going to school. Going to a library or surfing the more educational parts of the web doesn’t require any money from Olympia. As for the debt, hauling around the giant inflated black ball doesn’t do anything. Legislators didn’t put students in debt—students put students in debt. No one forces college students to take out loans. Trying to pass the burden of responsibility from the people who took out the loans to a group of dedicated public servants who are desperately trying to dig our state out of a budget deficit is not merely counter-productive; it’s reprehensible.

The final issue is what all of this together is trying to convey. At the first rally, on Feb. 8, the crystalline message was, “We are the future, don’t cut the future!” College is an investment in the future of not only the citizens of the state, but the state itself—culture, economy, businesses, society and everything else. It was a message of mutual benefit and argumentation: “here’s why this is important, and it’s in everyone’s interest to put money into our education.” By contrast, the message of the rally on Feb. 18 was one of coercion and entitlement: “we deserve this money, it’s our right, and we’re going to dress up in a threatening manner and play Rage Against the Machine to prove it.” The Canadian philosopher of communication Marshall McLuhan famously said that, “the medium is the message,” that the metaphors and symbols we use define how the message is perceived. If you were a legislator, what sort of message would these kinds of demonstrations send? Would it really seem like something positive to invest more money in?

The Nothing Man

The Nothing Man does his the best;
Doing nothing, like the rest
For as he sits, though life goes by,
He can't let all the others try.

The Dark Tower in our Midst

Brian LaFrance, Society of Digital Artists

The stronghold of tyranny has but one rifle, and we, its enemies, are many. We imagine ourselves lined up in ranks and files, ready to do battle with the evil forces of bigotry and intolerance, but it is only in the anonymity and safety of the crowd that we declare our moral strengths. Over time, we have become accustomed to this anonymity and safety, and when the rifle settles on us, we lose our courage.

The tyrants have learned a trick; if they point the gun at the nearest person, the one stepping farthest out of line, everyone is quick to ensure that someone else is closer than them. All of the brave defenders of liberal democracy and freedom make sure they are not at the front of the line and in the sights of the rifle. Thus, the outnumbered enemy has kept us in constant retreat, and even convinced some that if only we would remove the more outspoken and aggressive critics of hatred and oppression ourselves, they would leave us alone. The old tactic of divide and conquer is conquering us, and in our never ending race to the bottom, so-called liberals are turning against each other in the hopes that they won’t be seen as a threat by the enemy. In doing so, some have even managed the double-think of convincing themselves that the enemy isn’t really the enemy; that the true enemy is the one the tyrants point their angry fingers at, the ones who step out of line.

These are the people, we are told, who threaten peace and harmony. A peace upheld by submission to those who daily denounce the core principles of our nation: freedom of speech and the secular state.

But the enemies of liberty and truth cannot hide forever. Intolerance of gays and lesbians, mistreatment of women, bigotry against Jews and other religious faiths, and murderous contempt for any criticism are not the hallmarks of the critics of militant, reactionary Islam, but of militant, reactionary Islam. This is a fact that must be acknowledged if our values of freedom and democracy are to survive. These are values that benefit all people, no matter their gender, ethnicity or religion, and they really, truly are under attack.

The solution to the prisoner’s dilemma, the dilemma of the group having a single rifle aimed at their midst, is simple in theory. Without courage, however, it can become lethal for those who attempt it. One need look no further than the likes of Salmon Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Theo van Gogh, Maajid Nawaz, Lars Vilkes, Geert Wilders and, more recently, Lars Hedeggard to notice this. These are the brave soldiers who marched forward, sure that their line was advancing with them. Perhaps too late, they noticed they’d been left to advance against the fortress alone.

Three things must happen.

First, we must acknowledge that there are tyrants—backwards, violent theocrats—who do exist in the world today. They’re not “just” a vocal minority, they’re not doing what they do because they’re victims of Western imperialism and they really do kill people. We must admit to ourselves and proclaim and repeat that there really is something objectively, morally wrong people killing other people for being homosexual, for leaving their faith or for criticizing these practices too loudly. This requires the courage to face harsh realities, or as Orwell once put it, the “power of facing unpleasant facts.”

Second, we must stop submitting to the demands of the tyrants and shooting our own in the back with nonexistent labels like “Islamophobe,” and putting such people on trial for “hate speech,” as if an idea or a religion had feelings one could hurt, or a reputation one could destroy. The double-standard is clear if we consider what we would think if a politician were put on trial for hate-speech for saying blaming a political party for an economic downturn or accusing members of discrimination. This requires the courage of reconciliation, of admitting we might have been wrong about some things and that people we may have strongly disagreed with in the past might have been right.

Third, we must turn and join the charge against tyranny. Tolerance not a virtue when it tolerates intolerance, and that is precisely where we are and where we will remain if we do not find the solidarity and the courage to put an end to an enemy that isn’t unwilling to throw battery acid, rape, shoot, behead, and bomb whomever they like, and all the while to call for tolerance of its most grotesque crimes. This requires the greatest courage; the courage to acknowledge and accept that the rifle-sight may fall upon you in its sweep across the soldiers of the enlightenment. Many have died, and it is all but certain that many more will join their number before we can declare that we are through this dangerous chapter of history.

But the price of victory over the imposition of totalitarianism is worth it, for a life without freedom is, arguably, a life not worth living. We as a society face a choice: we can choose to accept a tower of death to stand unchallenged in our midst, destroying whom it pleases when it pleases, all the while growing stronger day by day, or we can choose to be intolerant of those who openly and incessantly call for the death of our culture and civilization, and laugh with delight at every sign of this visions’ progress. It is not a choice we may have for much longer.