Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Leftism and Political Correctness

  • ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Hoplophobia’

    My argument against the use of these and related terms is simple and straighforward.  A phobia, by definition, is an irrational fear.  (Every phobia is a fear, but not every fear is a phobia, because not every fear is irrational.)  Therefore, one who calls a critic of the doctrines of Islam or of the practices…

  • Equality and Affirmative Action

    "Equality, I spoke the word as if a wedding vow; ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." Bob Dylan, My Back Pages Reader Jacques spots an error of mine in a recent entry and goes on to make points with which I agree: In your recent post on "sloppy…

  • Could I Support a Muslim for President?

    It would depend on the Muslim. Consider first a parallel question: Could I support a Christian for president?  Yes, other things being equal, but not if he or she is a theocrat.  Why not?  Because theocracy is incompatible with the principles, values, and founding documents of the United States of America. Similarly, I could easily…

  • Sloppy Liberal Thinking About Equality

    Equality of opportunity is one thing, equality of outcome quite another.  The former is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition of the latter.  Yet many liberals think that any lack of equality of outcome for a given group argues an antecedent lack of equality of opportunity for that group.  This is a non sequitur…

  • Mona Charen on the Left-Leaning Pope Francis

    Here (emphasis added): According to "The Black Book of Communism," between 1959 and the late 1990s, more than 100,000 (out of about 10 million) Cubans spent time in the island's gulag. Between 15,000 and 19,000 were shot. One of the first was a young boy in Che Guevara's unit who had stolen a little food.…

  • Liberals and Standards

    Heather MacDonald reports: Monday’s violence [at the West Indian American Day Parade] also should provide advance warning that the New York City Council’s plan to decriminalize such quality-of-life laws as public drinking and public urination is a recipe for disaster. The decriminalization agenda in New York and nationally is driven by the specious claim that…

  • Mass Incarceration?

    Leftist lies here demolished. To understand the Left you must never forget that truth is not a leftist value.  Living proof: Obama and Hillary. Leftists, like Islamists, feel justified in engaging in any form of mendacity so long as it promotes their agenda.  And of course the agenda, the list of what is to be…

  • “Black Lives Matter”

    Victor Davis Hanson argues that this is just another of a series of silly slogans fated  to perish of its own inanity and be forgotten.   He gives it a year. Meanwhile lawlessness rises as Heather MacDonald documents. Part of the problem, of course, is the refusal to hold the Black Lives Matter crowd and their…

  • The Neo-Com Left’s Nihilist Agenda

    The following reproduced verbatim from Tully Borland's weblog.   In the absence of a practical alternative to the capitalist system, the [Marxist] revolutionary project is a nihilism–the will to destroy existing societies without an idea of what to do next. The persistence of the revolutionary illusion without the revolutionary fact has given rise to what…

  • Another Example of the Moral Depravity of the Left: Planned Parenthood

    Michelle Malkin's The Wine-Sipping Butchers of Planned Parenthood ends brilliantly: What kind of country do we live in where law-abiding businesses are fined, threatened and demonized for refusing to bake gay wedding cakes, but barbaric baby butchers are hailed by feminists, Hollywood and a president who asked God to "bless" them? God help us. In…

  • Political Correctness in Germany

    A German reader points us to Bloggende Studenten: Die Professoren-Stalker.

  • There is Nothing Liberal About Contemporary Liberals

    Three examples from Damon Linker: Brendan Eich resigned as the chief executive of Mozilla, a company he helped found, after gay rights activists launched a boycott against the company for placing him in a senior position. Eich's sin? More than five years earlier, he donated $1,000 to the campaign for California's Proposition 8, which sought…

  • White People Will Always be Racists

    Here's why.

  • Is Reason a White Male Euro-Christian Construct?

    I read John D.Caputo years ago, in the late '70s, in connection with work I was doing on Heidegger. I read a couple of his early Heidegger articles and a couple of his books.  One of them, The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought, is in my library.  Caputo seemed worth reading at the time.  But…

  • A Complaint from an Irish Reader

    "Your country's PC crap has come to my home town!" I am sorry to hear that, but I would point out that it is not my country's PC crap, but the PC crap of the hate-America leftists who are destroying a great country.  And yes, they do hate America because America is an idea before…