There appear to be inherent moral axioms that are the consequence of merely being that everyone, without much thought, understands as universal. For example, the idea that your body belongs to you and not someone else is ontologically essential. It can be taken as universal that if someone tries to harm or enslave you, you are naturally endowed with the ability and impetus to resist. Self-defense is just.
That same essential sense of ownership is extended to physical objects one customarily uses, for which one originates uses, or perfects through work to improve its usefulness. This extended ownership of objects is felt so personally that conflicts over property can give rise to combat between the most fundamental properties, the selves, such that each attempts to harm or enslave the other through physical means. Infringing on personal property, by either harming or stealing from others is universally considered wrong.
Some things are more wrong than others. Killing is worse than stealing a loaf of bread, hence morals are inherently relative. As the world has increased in complexity and crowdedness, we now have specialists to argue the merits of various relativities in ownership, but the essential merits of self-ownership and personal property have been largely acceded to in the law.
Presently, I'll simply define a moral absolutist as someone who always thinks they are always in the right, no matter how wrong they are. Even moral absolutists believe that the first three paragraphs are true, but only when it applies to them. For whatever reasons beyond the scope of this diary, whether their rightneousness originates from their religion, culture, socioeconomic status, or general selfishness, moral absolutists believe that everything they do is inherently just, and thus exempt everyone but themselves from the claim to personal ownership, both of the self and of personal property, and any responsibilities pertaining to property rights.
Being inherently just, absolutists undertake any means to achieve their ends, including abusing entrusted power and "fixing facts around policy," also known as lying, distorting, and falsifying history, as occurred in the case of Iraqi WMD claims. In short, absolutists assert their rightness and justness, act in whatever way achieves their ends, then falsify evidence to support the original contention of "justness," when others rightly complain of property violations.
Relativists, those who also believe in property rights, but recognize personal fallibility, agree that absolutists have no divine or inherent right to usurp the rights of others, that the falsification of facts and history is central to the absolutists' method of muddying a normal person's otherwise clear-sighted view of justice, and that facts are antithetical to absolutist ambitions. Authoritarian moral absolutists persecute the "moral relativism" of intellectuals precisely because the intellectuals are the toughest line of defense against the lies, distortions, and falsifications of history promulgated by absolutists to cover their own tracks. Intellectuals, academicians, and ordinary highly educated folks have spent a great deal of their lives learning to assess facts. To the relativists, getting the facts correct first before entering into judgements about what those facts mean is simply a question of logic.
Can you logically say you have justly sentenced a guilty man if you first haven't determined whether he is guilty? It's simply illogical because guilt is pre-supposed. And what constitutes a fair test of guilt? Should it allow hearsay and secret evidence? Most would agree that unconfirmed "facts" carry little weight compared to facts that can be independently verified by others. Such questions define the difference between absolutists and relativists. Relativists want to know the facts before they judge them according to their relative magnitude in order to refine and maximize justice, whereas as absolutists want to do whatever favors themselves, then justify it after the fact by lying, distorting, and falsifying history.
Moral absolutists also like to bully people about facts they don't like, which is why Joe Lieberman and Lynn Cheney created the Academic Council of Trustees and Alumni, yet another lie factory to discredit, attack, and intimidate intellectuals into silence without presenting valid arguments. Joe Lieberman is a very bad man, a deeply flawed individual, and a typical authoritarian liar. Please vote Joe Lieberman out of public life for good. Never let him back. You can read their statements against intellectuals here:
http://www.mediatransparency.org/...
This graph shows the relationship between people with facts (level of education) and the persistent false belief that Iraq had WMD, and was presumably justly attacked by the United States.
Bush admitted there were no WMD, yet clearly this false belief is still widely held. Belief in this lie is inversely related to the attainment of education. The better educated you are, the less likely you are to believe in the lies, distortions, and falsifications of history used to cover the nefarious crimes of moral absolutists. Education level accounts for 96% of the variance in this belief. No wonder they hate intellectuals and their facts. If the absolutists were completely exposed, justice would demand criminal indictments for their aggressive invasion in Iraq for the purpose of harming individuals and stealing their property. I suppose the educated ones who still "believe" the WMD lies are the sophists over at Redstate.com.
The moral absolutists are trying to falsify the history of 9/11, but educated people already know at least part of the real path to 9/11. It started when some moral absolutists decided the American people were unfit for voting.
(Sorry. Five of these justices were supposed to be wearing Mickey Mouse hats, but I lost the pic!)
NYT's Adam Cohen:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The ruling that stopped the Florida recount and handed the presidency to George W. Bush is disappearing down the legal world's version of the memory hole, the slot where, in George Orwell's "1984," government workers disposed of politically inconvenient records. The Supreme Court has not cited it once since it was decided, and when Justice Antonin Scalia, who loves to hold forth on court precedents, was asked about it at a forum earlier this year, he snapped, "Come on, get over it."
There is a legal argument for pushing Bush v. Gore aside. The majority opinion announced that the ruling was "limited to the present circumstances" and could not be cited as precedent. But many legal scholars insisted at the time that this assertion was itself dictum -- the part of a legal opinion that is nonbinding -- and illegitimate, because under the doctrine of stare decisis, courts cannot make rulings whose reasoning applies only to a single case.
Dictum. Diktat. Dictatorial. Dictator. What kind of argument does Dictator Scalia make about ushering an authoritarian moral absolutist into the Presidency? And then he has the balls to call it a non-binding precedent? "Come on, get over it." Cohen goes on to suggest that actually upholding the decision to realize equal protection could go a long way to making fairer elections, and make this particular lie work to our advantage. The moral absolutists won't allow it. The Ninth Circuit chose to hide the Supreme lie in California, and they'll hide it again in Ohio. Diktat down the memory hole.
As a consequence of that Supreme Mickey Mouse Diktat to falsely invest public trust in an uneducated, moral absolutist who dreamt of remaking the Middle East through pre-emptive war and theft, when he should have been doing his real job of securing the nation,
Worse yet, Napoleon Bush thinks Iraq is not his Waterloo, and history cannot judge him for a long, long time to come. Therefore, if he starts another war with Iran, the ramifications of the cataclysmic debacle won't be understood for generations. Most educated people think the facts of Iraq and Lebanon speak for themselves in the present. Moreover, what's the causus belli this time? But facts don't matter to the moral absolutists, even in a scenario that is a nightmare for the rest of us. Remember the lies that brought us violations of person and property (aka war crimes) in Iraq.
Disney and ABC act at the behest of these moral absolutist authoritarians to rewrite the 9/11 chapter of abject failure and criminal malfeasance, and perhaps free-up some political capital to steal more elections and continue the "just" rampage through the Middle East that seeks to deprive others of their personal properties.
You'd think even Mickey Mouse could figure out that you don't kill someone, steal their cheese, then lie about it. It's time to go nuclear on The House of Mickey Mouse.