Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Leftism and Political Correctness

  • Marx at 200: Classical versus Cultural Marxism

    Here

  • What is Cultural Marxism?

    Despite the febrile complaints of some leftists, 'cultural Marxism' is a useful term that picks out a genuine cultural phenomenon. It is no myth. Nor is it an anti-Semitic or a racist 'dog whistle.'  It is alleged by leftists  to be an anti-Semitic conservative slur because the members of the Frankfurt School were mainly Jews,…

  • Hitchens, Horowitz, Clinton, and Impeachment

    Christopher Hitchens died on this date in 2011. The synergistic effects of his excessive consumption of smoke and spirits did him in at the tender age of 62.  By comparison, David Horowitz is still going strong at 81 churning out books, manning the ramparts, and fighting the good fight. May he live to be 100!…

  • Like Islamists, Leftists Hate Apostates

    David Horowitz, Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey (Spence Publishing, 2003), pp. 274-276: The radical commitment is less a political than a moral choice. Leaving the faith is a traumatic experience because it involves an involuntary severing of communal ties. That is why "political correctness" is a habit of the progressive mind – it is the line of…

  • Some Questions about White Privilege

    There is a lot of talk these days about white privilege.  The notion cries out for some squinty-eyed scrutiny. 1. White privilege is presumably a type of privilege.  What is a privilege?  This is the logically prior question. To know what white privilege is we must first know what privilege is.  Let's consider some definitions. D1.  A privilege is…

  • The Barbarian Threat in Our Own Children

    David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, Touchstone, 1997, p. 3: Irving Kristol, who had second thoughts before me, has observed that every generation faces a barbarian threat in its own children, who need to be civilized. This is the perennial challenge: to teach our young the conditions of being human, of managing life’s tasks…

  • Narratives and the Left

    Leftists love narratives because a narrative needn't be true to be a narrative. Their assessment criteria are identity-tribal rather than logical.  A good narrative is a coherent  story that enhances the tribe's power. Whether true or false is not to the point, the point being power. Truth is not a leftist value. It is not…

  • The Dyslexic Dems

    They read 'U.S.' as 'S. U.'

  • Amy Wax Interviewed

    Here is a taste: Once again, you’d have to define racism. You’re basically saying any generalization about a group, whether true or false—and we know it doesn’t apply to everybody in the group, because that’s just a straw man—is racist. I mean, we could do “sexist,” right? We could. So, women, on average, are more…

  • Leftist Omni-Politicization

    For the Left, everything is either political or to be politicized, including that which is non-political. Take this to its logical extreme and you end up with 'woke' mathematics. This reductio ad absurdum will cause a sane person to reject the premise. The sane will point out that some things, by their very nature, cannot…

  • Asinine Leftist Verbiage

    An incomplete list, and not necessarily in order of inanity, insanity, or asininity.  I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to explain the various ways in which the following offend against clear thought or are otherwise objectionable. Diversity is our strength. That's not who we are. We are all immigrants. Comprehensive immigration…

  • David Stove Pays Tribute to David Armstrong and Comments on the Malignancy of the Left

    Excerpt: But, while David has never aspired to put the world right by philosophy, the world for its part has not been equally willing to let him and philosophy alone in return. Quite the reverse. His tenure of the Chair turned out to coincide with an enormous attack on philosophy, and on humanistic learning in…

  • The State under Leftism: Totalitarianism cum pane et circensibus

    Although the state under contemporary leftism is totalitarian and demands conformity and submission in matters of moment, it tolerates and indeed encourages the cultivation of a politically inconsequential individualism of private self-absorption.  A people given bread (food stamps and other forms of infantilizing dependency), circuses (mass sporting events), dope (legalization of marijuana), HollyWeird pornography and…

  • Diversity

    Opposing natural diversity, leftists seek to impose social diversity by law.

  • Trotsky’s Faith in Man

    On this date in 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own. …………………………………………. The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime…