Watch Bristol Palin Confront Verbally Abusive Heckler

Watch Bristol Palin Confront Verbally Abusive Heckler

WARNING!!! Video contains graphic language!!!

Class from Bristol Palin.

Crass and degenerative from the heckler.
The worst part of this is knowing there are people who think, and will act this way, sober.

Reflections on the worst of man — and the best.

I have take the liberty of quoting extensively. Please go read this essay by C. R. Hardy on Nationalreview.com. After the last post, I found this to be very appropriate.

I can imagine those young students in Blacksburg getting up on Monday morning, probably hitting the snooze button a few times before dragging themselves out of bed...It’s not hard to imagine it. A regular, ordinary Monday morning. None of the students thought it would be their last.
Death disguised as an ordinary Monday morning in an ordinary classroom on an ordinary American campus. Hell in Blacksburg — hell on earth.
It reminds me of another hell that took Americans by surprise nearly six years ago. Another ordinary morning. Men and women going to work on a sunny, blue-skies morning. Airplanes rendered as giant homicidal missiles.
Pope Benedict surprised audiences recently with some short — very short — comments on hell. Just three weeks ago, addressing a small Filipino parish in Rome, Benedict reminded us gently that hell “exists and is eternal.” He said that Christ wants us to go to heaven; but if we choose to shut God out of our lives, hell is a very real possibility. He wanted us to remember that hell after death is a product of human choices and not the evil invention of a sadistic God.

Four years before 9/11, the summer after my junior year in college, I had my own encounter with hell on earth. I was sitting in the back of an ugly, old tour-bus when the girl I was traveling with, a friend of just two weeks, asked me out of nowhere (it seemed to me), Do you believe that hell exists? I was somewhat annoyed, once the question had registered. We had just visited Auschwitz-Birkenau.....The question pressed me for an answer, and one that would belittle my pride: “Do you believe in hell?”
Of course I believed in hell. Obviously. After visiting Auschwitz, who doesn’t?
Finally the word came into my mouth — “Yes.” And my friend said the same — yes, she believed it, too. And then, neither of us looking at the other, she said the following — slowly and deliberately, as if she had been formulating the thought all afternoon: “I also believe that hell exists. But I just realized that I don’t live as if I believed that hell exists. And Auschwitz, that’s just what man can do. But what can God do?”
Those thoughts made me reflect on my comfortable existence and the choices I was making.
But four years later, when a lone airplane buried itself into the earth, and a rural cornfield in Pennsylvania was fertilized with the blood of heroes — a different thought came to my mind. I came to understand hell as a great lesson for the drama of human freedom. Dostoevsky had the right conclusion: everything is permitted — but not because God is dead. Everything is permitted because we are free. We are free to ravage other men, to reap misery and destruction. But we are also free to be heroes, to make choices that correspond to the greatest capacities within us, to give our lives for others, to find meaning even when — precisely when — evil has its moment, to turn tragedy into triumph.

I can also imagine how Professor Liviu Librescu began his day. I doubt he hit the snooze button several times and barely made it to class, unkempt and groggy. He was probably up before dawn and working at his research hours before he had to lecture. He surely did not expect to encounter hell on earth once more, not on an April day at Virginia Tech. Yet when he heard the clang of gun shots, he knew what he was hearing, as he had heard it before — the shots of Nazi executioners when, as a young boy, he survived a concentration camp. Librescu ran to the door, blocked it, and told his students to escape.

While one man, with his freedom, was showing us a picture of hell, another was testifying with that same freedom to freedom’s source and purpose.

The nature of evil

The ongoing conflicts across the world are a contest between Good and Evil. The recent atrocity at VT and previous ones are also conflicts between Good and Evil. Wretchard at Belmont Club has put it better than I've ever seen it.
(empahsis mine)

Deliver us from evil
According to the AP. Iraqi insurgents are now fighting each other, as "moderate" Sunni terrorists tangle with "extremist" al-Qaeda whose brand of Islam is so radical that it prohibits placing cucumbers beside tomatoes because these vegetables have different genders.
Iraqi police and security forces — not Americans — have been negotiating with 1920 Revolution Brigades fighters, who have said "they want some help against al-Qaida," Baker said.
"That's a plus for this place, and we're going to try to exploit that," he said. "We're not making allies with anybody ... but we are monitoring what's going on."
American officers say the clashes have weakened the insurgency. In the last month in Diyala, 1920 Revolution Brigades fighters eased up attacks on Americans, largely turning their guns on al-Qaida, Baker said.
What makes men kill each other over tomatoes and cucumbers? What makes people kill each other at all? In the last few hours a gunman at the Houston space center took fellow employees hostage, then killed one before killing himself. Over the past few days the US has experienced an epidemic of threats on schools by Cho wannabees, each swearing to break some kind of sick record for psychosis. The spike in these incidents is interesting because they resemble the outcome of a controlled experiment. The numbers of guns out there has not varied much in the last week, but the media coverage of such deranged acts has. The one factor has been held constant while the other has been varied. And the results are strongly suggestive of what my childhood confessors used to emphasize: that bad thoughts have consequences.
As a child I was taught one could "sin through thought, word and deed". Somewhere in the intervening years society seems to have forgotten about the "sins" of thought and word largely because it refused to believe in taboos. There were, the school chaplains used to say, dark doors beyond which it was dangerous for the mind to go. There were thoughts you could not think -- unless you were strong enough to wrestle with what you would find beyond the portal.
Pedophilia, bestiality, extreme cruelty, monstrous behavior -- these are no longer ideas which we dare not entertain or cast out of our minds should they fleet through our consciousness out of the fear of "sin". No.Pedophilia has itself become a cause for enlightened people. The North American Man-Boy Love Association argues children must have sex with adults "before eight or it's too late". Instead we have cast out the idea of sin itself and made the conception of sin as sin our only societal taboo.

Until I saw this essay, I've been mystified as to why our society, and I mean the worldwide society, has degenerated. All actions begin with thought. I was taught that what I thought mattered and that some thoughts were wrong. Today, we are taught that only actions can be wrong. One commenter, Alexis, has a key thought:

"The principal reason why I detest al-Qaeda with such vehemence is not merely because of what they do to others, but the fantasies they unleash within me of what I would like to do to the terrorists.I resent them not merely because they do evil, but because they seek to plunge the rest of us into their hell. It is less the evil they commit that infuriates me than their desire to impress others with how evil they are. Their exhibitionism unleashes two reactions within me. One dislikes the evil they do. The other is to feel offense against their exhibitionism, to be utterly unimpressed by the level of evil they are committing precisely because I suspect what I'm capable of if my mind goes in the wrong direction. I'm reminded of the Crocodile Dundee quote, "That's not a knife. This is a knife."

Of course we are fighting the good fight.
No civilized society can survive unless it can defeat ideologies such as al-Qaeda.
Was area bombing really necessary during World War II? If it were possible to win the war on the battlefield against Germany and Japan without using area bombing, there would still be a case for bombing civilians from the air because Germany and Japan introduced the tactic of bombing civilians into modern warfare and as such must be shown what "total war" really means. Taken out of context, the bombing of Dresden would clearly be a war crime, but Germany's declaration of "Total War" leaves no doubt that this bombing could be logically expected from its own policy. It is the very precision of our armaments that leaves us able to keep al-Qaeda's cheerleaders from feeling the brunt of their own policy of atrocity.
That which makes me regard al-Qaeda with special loathing is not that I wish them dead, but rather that their behavior incites within me a desire to see the leadership of al-Qaeda and its allied clerics hanged, drawn, and quartered; impaled; or worse torments that I would rather not describe in a public forum. My resentment against the jihadists putting snuff video onto the airwaves leads me to feel a level of violence that goes far beyond a desire to merely kill the perpetrators. I hardly regard it to be self-loathing to dislike how I can imagine myself torturing leaders of al-Qaeda or how I would enjoy the process of killing them.
I'm reminded of the scene from "Lawrence of Arabia". To paraphrase a scene, Lawrence says, "I killed a man." The British officer asks, "So?" Lawrence replies, "I liked it."
The fictionalized Lawrence was caught a civilized revulsion against the enjoyment of killing people and his very human enjoyment of killing as sport.
Events in this war may eventually lead to the massacre of entire tribes and cities of people who support al-Qaeda and what it stands for, but if we go about enjoying a blood sport to annihilate the root culture of al-Qaeda without feeling at least some revulsion against the barbarity of enjoying the destruction of peoples and cities, something within us will be lost.

Justice sets limits to violence. Al-Qaeda's behavior incites violence without limit.
That's why I loathe al-Qaeda with special vehemence.

I, too, feel that way. The anger I feel is not just caused by the terroristic, violent acts, but also because the very nature of those acts are so atrocius that I start to not care about the humanity of those causing said acts.