Month: August 2019

Contemporary ‘Liberals’ Have Trouble with Distinctions: Beginning of a Catalog of Examples

Contemporary 'liberals' (leftists)  seem incapable of distinguishing between

  • nationalism and white nationalism
  • patriotism and jingoism
  • legal and illegal immigration
  • immigration and emigration
  • race and skin color
  • racism and race realism
  • statements whose subject matter is race and racist statements
  • white people and white supremacists
  • legitimate and illegitimate forms of discrimination
  • free speech and hate speech
  • hate and dissent
  • people and propositions
  • democracies and republics
  • fact-stating and emotive uses of language
  • races and religions
  • social constructs and natural realities
  • equality of opportunity and equality of outcome
  • a citizen and a person who happens to be within a nation's geographical boundaries.

We are Bothered by Different Things

Brian Kennedy, A Passion to Oppose: John Anderson, Philosopher, Melbourne University Press, 1995, p. 141:

Melbourne intellectuals came to regard [John] Anderson 'as the man who had betrayed the Left, a man who had gone over to the other side.  Melburnians wanted Anderson to answer a simple question: was he or was he not interested in the fact that some were very rich and some were very poor?'  To this question Anderson replied that 'we are all bothered by different things.  That finished him with the Melburnians'. [Kennedy quotes Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace, Melbourne, 1991, p. 193]

"We are all bothered by different things."  And even when we are bothered by the same things, we prioritize the objects of botherment differently.  Now suppose you and I are bothered by exactly the same things in exactly the same order.  There is still room for disagreement and possibly even bitter contention: we are bothered to different degrees by the things that bother us.

"It angers me that that doesn't anger you!"  "It angers me that  you are insufficiently angered by what angers both of us."

Here then is one root of political disagreement.  It is a deep root, perhaps ineradicable.  And it is a root of other sorts of disagreement as well.  We are bothered by different things.

Are conservatives bothered by gun violence?  Yes, of course.  But the Americans among them are bothered more by the violation of the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens. Liberals, even if they are slightly bothered by the violation of these rights, assuming they admit them in the first place, are much more bothered by gun violence.  Now there are factual questions here concerning which agreement is in principle possible, though exceedingly unlikely.  For example there is the question whether more guns in the hands of citizens leads to less crime.   That is a factual question, but one that is not going to be resolved to the satisfaction of all.  Conservatives and liberals disagree about the facts.  Each side sees the other as having its own 'facts.'

But deeper than facts lie values.  Here the problem becomes truly intractable.  We are bothered by different things because we differ about values and their ordering.  American conservatives and presumably most liberals value self-reliance but conservatives locate it much higher up in the axiological hierarchy.  This probably explains why liberals are more inclined to rely on professional law enforcement for protection against the criminal element even while they bash cops as a bunch of racists eager to hunt down and murder "unarmed black teenagers" such as Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri fame.  (Brown was unarmed, but tried to arm himself with the cop's gun. This is an important detail conveniently left out of the biased mainstream media accounts.)

As for what finished Anderson with the Melburnians, he was apparently not sufficiently exercised by (material) inequality for the tastes of the latter despite his being a man of the Left, though not reliably so due to his iconoclasm.

Does it bother conservatives that there is wealth inequality?  To some extent.  But for a(n American) conservative, liberty trumps equality in the scale of values.  With liberals it is the other way around.  Liberals of course cherish their brand of rights and liberties and will go to absurd extremes in defending them even when the right to free expression, a big deal with them, spills over into incitement to violence and includes the pollution of the culture with pornography.  Of course, this extremism in defense of free expression bangs up against the liberals' own self-imposed limit of political correctness.  The trashers of Christianity suddenly become cowards when it comes to the trashing of Islam.  That takes more courage than they command.  And they are easily cowed by events such as the 7 January 2015 terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.  Liberals are also absurdly eager to spread the right to vote even at the expense of making the polling places safe for voter fraud.  How else do you explain their mindless opposition to photo ID? But not a peep from liberals about 'real' liberties and rights such as gun rights, the right to private property, and the right to freedom from excessive and punitive taxation.

Is material inequality a problem?  Not as such.  Why should it be?  

As I recall John Rawls' Difference Principle, the gist of it is this: Social and economic inequality is justified ONLY IF the inequality makes the worse off better than they would have been without the inequality.  Why exactly?  If I'm smarter than you, work harder, practice the ancient virtues, avoid the vices, while you are a slacker and a screw-up who nevertheless has what he needs, why is my having more justified ONLY IF it makes you better off than you would have been without the inequality? (Yes, I know all about the Original Position and the Veil of Ignorance, but I don't consider that an argument.)

At the root of our differences are value differences and those, at bottom, are irreconcilable. 

On that cheery note, I punch the clock. Have a pleasant weekend.

Will Middle America Go Gentle . . .

. . . into that good night? Patrick Buchanan:

Writes The New York Times‘ Charles Blow in a column that uses “racist” or “racism” more than 30 times: Americans who do not concede that Trump is a racist—are themselves racists: “Make no mistake. Denying racism or refusing to call it out is also racist.”

But what is racism?

Is it not a manifest dislike or hatred of people of color because of their color? Trump was not denouncing the ethnicity or race of Ilhan Omar in his rally speech. He was reciting and denouncing what Omar said, just as Nancy Pelosi was denouncing what Omar and the Squad were saying and doing when she mocked their posturing and green agenda.

Clearly Americans disagree on what racism is.

Buchanan's definition is on the right track except that he conflates race with skin color, which is but a superficial phenotypical indicator of race.  He also uses the silly phrase 'people of color.' But let that pass. He's a journalist; what do you expect?  Journalists, lemming-like, tend to repeat what they hear others saying.

The 'definition' of Omar and the Squad ought to be called a 'daffy-nition.'  You would have to be daft to accept it. To wit:

A racist is a person who criticizes anything any person of color says or does.

By this definition, Nancy Pelosi is a racist.  Now Madame Speaker is many things, few of them good; a racist, however, she is not.  If Pelosi is a racist, then we are all racists, and the word has been rendered useless.

Note also that the Squad definition implies that 'persons of color' can be racists. If Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortz criticize each other's ideas, then both become racists, despite being 'persons of color'!

But this contradicts a key tenet of race-baiters, namely, that 'no person of color' can be racist. Such are the wages of stupidity.

I am not Totally Opposed to Open Borders

I'm for half-open borders, borders open in the outbound direction.  Anyone who wants to emigrate should be allowed to do so. 

Communists need walls to keep people in; we need walls to keep them out.  Hence the rank absurdity of the comparison of a wall on our southern border to the Berlin Wall.  Now the mendacious leftists who make this comparison cannot be so historically uninformed as not to see its rank absurdity.  But they make it anyway because they will say or do anything to win.  They are out for power any way they can get it.

It is interesting that even hate-America leftists do not want to leave the United States. They talk about it, but few do it. And where do they say they will go?

Canada is high on the list. Why not Mexico? Are they perhaps racists?

Too Many Lawyers in Government, not Enough Doctors

(Written 10 September 2012)
 
Negatively, physicians are not lawyers.  Positively, they are scientifically trained without being mere theoreticians: they diagnose, they cut, they sew.  They are the plumbers and the auto mechanics of the mortal coil.  They grapple at close quarters with recalcitrant matter.  They do so fearlessly while lawyers watch, ready to pounce.    They don't just talk, write, and argue.  Not that the latter aren't important; they are.  But balance is also important.

We need more doctors, engineers, and businessmen in government — and fewer lawyers.  And a few working stiffs, too.  There are truck drivers and pipe fitters who could do the job.  How can a government top-heavy with lawyers be representative of the folks?

Lawyers are especially over-represented in the Democrat Party as Michael Medved observes:

By re-nominating Obama and Biden, the Democrats have selected only attorneys for all six of the most recent places on national tickets, cementing their status as the party of lawyers. Meanwhile, none of the last 8 Republicans nominated for president or vice president has been a practicing attorney.

Though Romney won a law degree in a joint program along with his Harvard MBA, he never joined the legal profession. All told, 14 of the last 18 places on Democratic national tickets since 1980 have gone to attorneys, and if Al Gore had finished law school at Vanderbilt before running for Congress, that would have been 17 of 18. The domination of the party by lawyers clearly connects to its propensity to address every problem with legal solutions—legislation, regulations, and law suits—rather than private sector, business initiatives.

None of the above is lawyer bashing.  We need lawyers if we are to have a legal system and the rule of law.  (And to defend ourselves against lawyers.) But lawyers, like liberals, have given themselves a bad name by their bad behavior.  They are too often the sophists of the modern world.  Remember the sophists of the ancient world? They knew how to make the weaker argument appear the stronger.

Martin Luther once vented his misology via "Reason is a whore."  But nowadays, when whores are sex workers, the Lutheran pronunciamento has lost its sting much as the oldest profession has lost its opprobrium. 

Perhaps in its stead we should put: "Reason is a lawyer."

Of Hillary and Robespierre

Richard Fernandez:

Perhaps the magnitude of Hillary's 2016 loss is only now becoming apparent. Clinton didn't just lose the White House, she also lost the Democratic center to the radical ornaments.  The diminution of Brooks, Stevens, Kristof, and even Biden are the consequence of that defeat. The radicals who once served the useful purpose of putting fear into the other side are taking center stage.  It's not surprising that the French Terror began with the purge of the moderates and the urgency of virtue. As Robespierre put it, virtuous men have no choice but to employ any means necessary:

If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie.

The Thing is older than one would think. And more voracious.  The intellectual Old Bolsheviks thought their illustrious records would protect them from the ruffian Stalin. Bukharin, who was eventually executed by Stalin, once said: "Koba, you used to be grateful for the support of your Bolshevik comrades." "Gratitude is a dog's disease," Stalin shot back.

It won't stop at Andy Ngo. There is no safety from It.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Victor Davis Hanson:

Politically Correct Hatred

Ilhan Omar presents a most exasperating case because on the one hand she poses as an avatar of the successful immigrant, while on the other she neurotically whines that America has failed utterly to meet her expectations when she fled a Kenyan refugee camp to enter the United States.

Her fervent anti-Israelism is fueled by an equally despicable and loud anti-Semitism. And she rarely seems to acknowledge that a foreign country welcomed her in extremis, subsidized her upbringing and education, and, quite unlike her tribalist, racist, and anti-Semitic native Somalia, relegated matters of race, gender, class, and religion to insignificant status or indeed saw them as advantages to be rewarded in electing her to Congress.

Omar herself was so desperate to gain U.S. citizenship that she may well have concocted a fraudulent marriage to her own British residing brother. If true, she may have committed several U.S. tax and immigration felonies. And that makes her ingratitude all the more unappealing—and her present apparent exemption from legitimate federal investigative scrutiny into her possibly serial illegal conduct all the more unbelievable.

So, the larger landscape of the new age of acrimony is not a sudden loss of manners, but rather a complete progressive meltdown at the election of Donald J. Trump.

[. . .]

The Antecedents of Trump Hatred
Again, by all means his opponents can, if they so wish, ridicule, caricature, and blast Trump and hope he fails. But after trying for nearly three years to destroy the president and prematurely remove him by any means necessary before a scheduled election, please do not appeal to the better angels of our nature—while deploring the new “unpresidential” behavior of Donald J. Trump for lashing out at those who sought to reduce him to a common criminal, pervert, traitor, dunce, and Satanic figure.

Such invective was always characteristic of the new progressive agenda rather than specific to Donald J. Trump. After the 2008 dismantling of John McCain into a senile lecher and reducing Mitt Romney into a tax cheat, animal tormenter, high-school hazer, elevator owner, and enabler of an equestrian wife with MS, and after George W. Bush was reduced to Nazi thug worthy of death in progressive novels, op-eds and docudramas, Donald Trump sensed that half the country had had enough and he would return slur for slur—and so may the best brawler win.

After all, in 2019, this 243rd year of our illustrious nation, most Americans are not simply going to curl up in a fetal position, apologize for the greatest nation in the history of civilization, and say, “Ah, you’re right, Representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib. It is an awful country after all—and always was.”

While one may always wish that the president and his critics tone down their venom and play by silk-stocking Republican Marquis of Queensberry rules, it is hard for half the country to feel much sympathy for the Left that sowed the wind and are reaping an ever growing whirlwind.

Gun Violence and Border Control: A Plea to Our ‘Liberal’ Brethren

Dear 'Liberal,'

If you are concerned with gun violence, then you ought to be concerned with controlling the border. A porous border allows for human trafficking, drug trafficking, and — wait for it — gun smuggling. Now can you grasp that weaponry illegally brought into the country can and will end up in the wrong hands?

Sure you can! And you CARE SO MUCH, don't you? Then you ought to support President Trump and oppose the obstructionist Democrats who either want open borders or practically promote them via their Trump-hating obstructionism.

The Trump Steamroller

Conrad Black on Trump's enemies:

They are failing to make the distinction between Trump’s policies and his mannerisms. No serious person can dispute the president’s economic successes (especially the virtual elimination of unemployment and energy imports), his revival of a viable policy of nuclear nonproliferation, taking serious measures to stop mass illegal immigration, moving decisively to address dangerous disadvantages in some trading relationships, and shaping up the Western alliance from an association of freeloading beneficiaries of an American military guaranty. He is the first businessman to be president, and he engaged in a policy form of zero-based budgeting. The underlying premise for climate policy is unproved and almost certainly largely false; he scrapped it. The notion that the U.S. performed a service for international development and world harmonization by allowing the Mexicans, Chinese, and others to pick America’s pockets and export unemployment to the United States was false. He is scrapping that. The idea, cherished by Democratic politicians and Republican employers of low-skilled workers, that masses of people could swarm into the country undocumented, be exploited in the labor market, and not be counted anywhere, but still vote (Democratic) and use the welfare and education systems is an outrage. Trump is scrapping that, too. The country is tired of spending billions more every year on education to destroy freedom of expression in the university and produce ever-less-well-educated students in the unionized state school systems. He is attacking those problems, too.