Leftism and Political Correctness – Page 36

The Problem: Gun Culture or Liberal Culture?

This is a repost, slightly redacted, from 2012 to help stem the tsunami of folderol sure to wash over us from the orifices of the mindless gun-grabbing Left in the wake of the Isla Vista rampage.

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Without wanting to deny that there is a 'gun culture' in the USA, especially in the so-called red states, I would insist that the real problem is our liberal culture. Here are four characteristics of liberal culture that contribute to violence of all kinds, including gun violence.

1. Liberals tend to have a casual attitude toward crime.

This is well-documented by Theodore Dalrymple. Here is a list of his articles. No Contrition, No Penalty is a short read. See also my Crime and Punishment category.

It is interesting to note that Connecticut, the state in which the Newtown massacre occurred, has recently repealed the death penalty, and this after the unspeakably brutal Hayes-Komisarjevsky home invasion in the same state.

One of the strongest voices against repealing the death penalty has been Dr. William Petit Jr., the lone survivor of a 2007 Cheshire home invasion that resulted in the murders of his wife and two daughters.

The wife was raped and strangled, one of the daughters was molested and both girls were left tied to their beds as the house was set on fire.

The two men convicted of the crime, Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, are currently on death row.

Anyone who cannot appreciate that a crime like this deserves the death penalty is morally obtuse. But not only are liberals morally obtuse, they are contemptibly stupid in failing to understand that one of the main reasons people buy guns is to protect themselves from the criminal element, the criminal element that liberals coddle. If liberals were serious about wanting to reduce the numbers of guns in civilian hands, they would insist on swift and sure punishment in accordance with the self-evident moral principle, "The punishment must fit the crime," which is of course not to be confused with lex talionis, "an eye for an eye." Many guns are purchased not for hunting or sport shooting but for protection against criminals. Keeping and bearing arms carries with it a grave responsibility and many if not most gun owners would rather not be so burdened. Gun ownership among women is on the upswing, and it is a safe bet that they don't want guns to shoot Bambi.

2. Liberals tend to undermine morality with their opposition to religion.

Many of us internalized the ethical norms that guide our lives via our childhood religious training. We were taught the Ten Commandments, for example. We were not just taught about them, we were taught them. We learned them by heart, and we took them to heart. This early training, far from being the child abuse that A. C. Grayling and other militant atheists think it is, had a very positive effect on us in forming our consciences and making us the basically decent human beings we are. I am not saying that moral formation is possible only within a religion; I am saying that some religions do an excellent job of transmitting and inculcating life-guiding and life-enhancing ethical standards, that moral formation outside of a religion is unlikely for the average person, and that it is nearly impossible if children are simply handed over to the pernicious influences of secular society as these influences are transmitted through television, Internet, video games, and other media. Anyone with moral sense can see that the mass media have become an open sewer in which every manner of cultural polluter is not only tolerated but promoted. Those of use who were properly educated way back when can dip into this cesspool without too much moral damage. But to deliver our children over to it is the real child abuse, pace the benighted Professor Grayling.

The shysters of the ACLU, to take one particularly egregious bunch of destructive leftists, seek to remove every vestige of our Judeo-Christian ethical traditiion from the public square. I can't begin to catalog all of their antics. But recently there was the Mojave cross incident. It is absurd that there has been any fight at all over it. The ACLU, whose radical lawyers brought the original law suit, deserve contempt and resolute opposition. Of course, I wholeheartedly endorse the initial clause of the First Amendment, to wit, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." But it is hate-America leftist extremism on stilts to think that the presence of that very old memorial cross on a hill in the middle of nowhere does anything to establish Christianity as the state religion. I consider anyone who believes that to be intellectually obtuse and morally repellent. One has to be highly unbalanced in his thinking to torture such extremist nonsense out of the First Amendment, while missing the plain sense of the Second Amendment, one that even SCOTUS eventually got right, namely, the the right to keep and bear arms is an individual, not a collective, right.

And then there was the business of the tiny cross on the city seal of Los Angeles, a symbol that the ACLU agitated to have removed. I could continue with the examples, and you hope I won't.

3. Liberals tend to have low standards, glorify the worthless, and fail to present exemplary human types.

Our contemporary media dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. It seems obvious that the liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.

What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their way of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.

The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable
styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching. And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy. Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world. See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.

4. Liberals tend to deny or downplay free will, individual responsibility, and the reality of evil.

This is connected with point 2 above, leftist hostility to religion. Key to our Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief that man is made in the image and likeness of God. This image is that mysterious power in us called free will. The secular extremist assault on religion is at the same time an assault on this mysterious power, through which evil comes into the world.

This is a large topic. Suffice it to say for now that one clear indication of this denial is the bizarre liberal displacement of responsibility for crime onto inaminate objects, guns, as if the weapon, not the wielder, is the source of the evil for which the weapon can be only the instrument.

Derbyshire’s Defenestration Revisited

The Left's race-baiting just won't stop. Here Jay Rockefeller plays the race card against Ron Johnson in a manner so egregious that it would in the early 19th century get the Democrat scumbag challenged to a duel. There are so many recent incidents of race-baiting that the thought of laying in the links is a dreary one indeed. So I'll just remind you of the John Derbyshire case which now lies about two years in the past. Around that time I wrote the following. Very instructive, in part about NRO's need to 'go along to get along.'

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In case you are not familiar with the word, 'defenestration' is from the Latin fenestra, window. Defenestration is thus the act of literally or figuratively throwing something or someone out of a window, or the state of having been ejected through such an aperture. In plain English, John Derbyshire, 'Derb,' got the boot from NRO's Rich Lowry. (Pardon the mixed metaphors.) Derb's free-lance contributions are no longer wanted there. And all because of Derb's The Talk: Nonblack Version.

Go ahead, click on the link and read the piece. If nothing else, it will hold your interest. It is also a good litmus test of your political affiliation. If it enrages you and strikes you as a racist screed, then you are a (contemporary) liberal. If you accept its advice as sound, though perhaps in need of minor qualification or correction here and there, then you are a person as sane and reasonable and moderate as your humble correspondent. If you think Derb didn't go far enough, then chances are you are an extreme right-wing crazy.

I have just read Derb's talk, very carefully, a second time. What is so offensive about it? Facts are facts. What's true is true. The criterion of truth is not agreement with liberal ideology. Consider this piece of advice:

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

That could use some qualification. If a well-dressed black, alone, were in automotive distress, I might stop to render aid. But if it were a carload of teenaged gangsta rapper types, I'd accelerate. I wouldn't want to catch a stray round in what could be termed an inverse drive-by shooting. But if you are giving advice to your kids, you might say something like the above sans qualification, in the same way you would advise them to avoid biker bars at midnight in bad parts of town without feeling the need to point out the obvious, e.g., that not every biker is a brute out to rape and pillage.

So what's to take offense at?

Should Mark Cuban Get the Donald Sterling Treatment? Notes on Prejudice

Bill Plaschke of the L. A. Times lays into Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, for statements like these:

“I mean, we’re all prejudiced in one way or another,” he said. “If I see a black kid in a hoodie and it’s late at night, I’m walking to the other side of the street. And if on that side of the street there’s a guy that has tattoos all over his face – white guy, bald head, tattoos everywhere – I’m walking back to the other side of the street. And the list goes on of stereotypes we all live up to and are fearful of.”

The word 'prejudice' needs analysis. At a bare minimum, two senses of the term ought to be distinguished.

'Prejudice' could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar. We should all condemn blind prejudice, or at least blind prejudice of the aversive sort. It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people do that? How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior.

'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.' Although blind aversive prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good. We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant. We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past exerience. Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience. The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious. After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam. They distill from their unpleasant olfactory experiences a well-grounded prejudice against the products of the distillery.

My prejudgments about rattlesnakes are in place and have been for a long time. I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. I do not treat each new one encountered as a 'unique individual,' whatever that might mean. Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa. What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.

So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice. The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark. Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re.

But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not 'discriminating' against them? Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates. Liberals are especially discriminating. The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in. Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways. That's why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction.

Is the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' as marriage discriminatory? Of course! But not all discrimination is bad. Indeed, some is morally obligatory. We discriminate against felons when we disallow their possession of firearms. Will you argue against that on the ground that it is discriminatory? If not, then you cannot cogently argue against the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' on the ground that it is discriminatory. You need a better argument. And what would that be?

'Profiling,' like 'prejudice' and 'discrimination,' has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation. Unjustly. What's wrong with profiling? We all do it, and we are justified in doing it. Consider criminal profiling.

It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.

Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can't answer this question, then you lack common sense. But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a three-minute romp. Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.

Or let's say you are walking down a street in Mesa, Arizona. On one side of the street you spy some fresh-faced Mormon youths, dressed in their 1950s attire, looking like little Romneys, exiting a Bible studies class. On the other side of the street, Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels are coming out of their club house. Which side of the street would you feel safer on? On which side will your concealed semi-auto .45 be more likely to see some use?

Do you struggle over this question?

The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness.

Their brains are addled by the equality fetish: everybody is equal, they think, in every way. So the vigorous 20-year-old is not more likely than the old man to have committed the rape. The Mormon and the Hells Angel are equally law-abiding. And the twenty-something Egyptian Muslim is no more likely to be a terrorist than the Mormon matron from Salt Lake City.

Getting back to Mark Cuban, what he is quoted as saying above makes perfect sense. His prejudices are reasonable prejudgments.

If you walk like a thug, and talk like a thug, and dress like a thug, and are plastered with tattoos and facial hardware like a thug, then don't be surprised if people give you a wide berth.

It is the willful self-enstupidation of liberals that unfits them for the appreciation of such commonsensical points as I have just reiterated.

The Illiberalism of Contemporary ‘Liberals’

Go Kirsten! Kirsten Powers has it all: beauty, brains, and the female equivalent of that which I was about to refer to using a word I decided not to use. I think I'm in love. And she stands up to Bill O'Reilly displaying grace under pressure when the pugnacious Irishman becomes obnoxious. She's smarter than O'Reilly and she knows it. Bill does too. But hats off to O'Reilly for giving the young whippersnappers a forum and for speaking truth to power lo these many years. He is an inspiring profile in civil courage.

"Speaking truth to power" is a lefty phrase that we need to co-opt. Leftards use the phrase even when they have power. You see, for a lefty, having power is supposedly bad and so they have to pretend that they don't have it even when they do. It's like money in that respect. They like to posture that they are anti-Establishment when they are the Establishment, and that they are dissenting when they are spouting and toeing the party line. They also think they somehow own dissent as if conservatives are somehow barred by the very meaning of the word from dissenting.

In any case, Miss Powers really hits the nail on the head in her column: Here is some of it and it ought to anger you with a righteous anger:

Don't bother trying to make sense of what beliefs are permitted and which ones will get you strung up in the town square. Our ideological overlords have created a minefield of inconsistency. While criticizing Islam is intolerant, insulting Christianity is sport. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is persona non grata at Brandeis University for attacking the prophet Mohammed. But Richard Dawkins describes the Old Testament God as "a misogynistic … sadomasochistic … malevolent bully" and the mob yawns. Bill Maher calls the same God a "psychotic mass murderer" and there are no boycott demands of the high-profile liberals who traffic his HBO show.

The self-serving capriciousness is crazy. In March, University of California-Santa Barbara women's studies professor Mireille Miller-Young attacked a 16-year-old holding an anti-abortion sign in the campus' "free speech zone" (formerly known as America). Though she was charged with theft, battery and vandalism, Miller-Young remains unrepentant and still has her job. But Mozilla's Brendan Eich gave a private donation to an anti-gay marriage initiative six years ago and was ordered to recant his beliefs. When he wouldn't, he was forced to resign from the company he helped found.

Got that? A college educator with the right opinions can attack a high school student and keep her job. A corporate executive with the wrong opinions loses his for making a campaign donation. Something is very wrong here.

As the mob gleefully destroys people's lives, its members haven't stopped to ask themselves a basic question: What happens when they come for me? If history is any guide, that's how these things usually end.

Powers is a Dem. But she's young; give her time.

Joachim Fest, Not I

One of the books I am reading is Joachim Fest's Not I: Memories of a German Childhood (orig. publ. in German in 2006 by Rowohlt, tr. Martin Chalmers, New York, Other Press, 2013).

The title alludes to Mark 14:29: "But Peter said unto him, Although all shall be offended, yet will not I."

WSJ review by T. J. Reed here. I reproduce a sizeable chunk of it in case it ends up behind a pay wall:

The [Fest] family lives under a shadow. Their dissent is no secret. Father had been a member of the Reichsbanner, the organization in which his Catholic Centre Party had joined with liberals and Social Democrats to defend the republic against Communists and Nazis. It's not every school headmaster who gets involved in street fights and comes home bloody, as Johannes Fest did. But after 1933 he was a headmaster no longer, suspended indefinitely by the new political masters. The family's status and income were lost, their lives transformed. Grandfather had to come out of retirement to earn a bit for them. Father never worked again. The Nazis did try to cajole him back into teaching, since any observable dissent was bad publicity. They even offered accelerated promotion if he would outwardly conform. He remained firm.

Family tension became palpable. Mother, bearing the brunt of straitened family circumstances, asks Father if he might not compromise. Weren't lies always the resort of the "little people"? He replies: "We aren't little people." It is one of the maxims that guided the conduct of Fest's father and a few friends. (The title of his son's memoir comes from a Gospel passage that he would often quote, Peter promising Jesus: "Even if all others fall away—not I.") There were some Germans who made sure that they were carrying something in both hands when they went out into the street, the only plausible ground for not giving the required "Heil Hitler" salute to anyone they met. But Fest's father goes out resolutely empty-handed.

"Keep your head down," Johannes [father of Joachim] told his family, "but don't let it make you smaller." Young Joachim didn't always listen. A classmate reports him for carving a Hitler caricature on his desk. (He has been scribbling them on surfaces all over town.) As a consequence, he is removed from the school; his brothers too. The episode is just one instance of an independence akin to his father's.

The friends of the Fests—they now became former friends—and many neighbors and acquaintances fell by the wayside, even without being keen Nazis. Only one of the 12 families in the apartment block was in the party. The rest merely went along as things changed, drifting deeper into acquiescence, making excuses even as stable social and political structures fell apart in the name of a new "people's community." The Nazis, after all, were formally the legitimate government, however brutal their conduct of affairs—from the realm of international diplomacy to the arbitrary laws that replaced justice down to the small changes in everyday life, the swindles and favoritism of party members.

By recording these small changes, Joachim Fest creates a picture of how the one-party state operated on an intimate level, and exerted its unbreakable grip. It recalls the bleak account of incremental misery in Victor Klemperer's diaries of the period. A woman sees a Jewish-looking man in the street not wearing a star, pursues and denounces him. There are first rumors and then reliable evidence of atrocities.

Anti-Semitism had considerably more popular resonance than many other Nazi policies, such as the campaign for "Lebensraum" in the east. How many Germans would have wanted to up sticks and resettle somewhere on the vast Russian plains? As for Jewish Germans themselves, even after Kristallnacht there were those who waited for the Nazi "phase" to pass. Their trust in a culture that had produced Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Beethoven, a culture into which they felt they had assimilated, meant that they delayed escape too long.

But was it German culture that produced Kant, Goethe, et al.? Or was it the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian culture that had its sources in Athens and Jerusalem? That is one question. A second question is whether talk of production is anywhere near adequate, whether any culture could produce such geniuses as opposed merely to providing a fertile soil in which they developed themselves.

A third question is whether we are not now drifting toward a totalitarian unculture in which the slightest deviations from politically correct modes of thought and speech bring down drastic punishments on those who think they can speak their minds in private and in public without fear of reprisal from illiberal 'liberals.'

Black Privilege

In the Orwellian world of the leftist loon, black is white, so black privilege, which exists, becomes white privilege, which doesn't.

But there is no point in serious discussion with delusional leftards, so the best course of action is mockery and derision either in the moderate style of Kurt Schlichter or the take-no-prisoners style of Jim Goad.

In the interests of full disclosure, I am not now and never have been a redneck or a Southerner and I don't agree with everything Goad says. But I am heartily sick of lying liberal scum and their endless race-baiting, double-standards, and preternatural dumbassery.

The Liberal

A liberal is the kind of person who would extend the right to vote to felons but will not grant the right to life to the unborn. How 'liberal' is that? How 'inclusive'? How respectful of 'diversity'?

Should felons be allowed to vote? The conservative answers with alacrity. "Of course not. Why should those who cannot order their own lives prudently be allowed to have a say in the ordering of society?"

There is no wisdom on the left.

Capital Punishment and the Difference between Conservatives and Leftists

The difference springs to the eye by comparison of this morally sane piece by Peter Hitchens and this one by Hendrik Hertzberg.

Hendrik makes no mention of the crime, the victim, and her horrible death. Instead, typical leftist that he is, he invests his interest in the perceived underdog without any consideration of why the dirty dog is in his inferior position. Hitchens puts the emphasis where it belongs. Hendrik:

The classic justifications for the death penalty have not changed much over the centuries. There is retribution—an eye for an eye, a life for a life. There is deterrence—this is what awaits you if you transgress. And there is awe—a graphic demonstration of the ultimate power of the state.

No talk of justice, but a shabby suggestion that the principle that the punishment must fit the crime is to be interpreted as a narrow lex talionis injunction, as if the death penalty is in every case like the barbarity of gouging out the eye of the eye-gouger.

There is also something curious about leftists, who are totalitarians from the ground up, the top down, and from side to side, worrying about the ultimate power of the state. These are same moral cretins who want to use the power of the state to force florists and caterers to violate their consciences.

Anyone who doesn't see the moral necessity of the death penalty in certain carefully circumscribed cases, anyone who thinks that it is always and everywhere and in principle immoral, is morally obtuse.

Harry Reid, Latter-Day McCarthyite

Here:

[Senator Joseph] McCarthy in the 1950s became infamous for smearing his opponents with lurid allegations that he could not prove, while questioning their patriotism. Reid has brought back to the Senate that exact same McCarthy style of six decades ago — and trumped it.

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Reid libeled candidate Mitt Romney with the unsubstantiated and later-refuted charge that Romney was a tax cheat. "The word's out that he [Romney] hasn't paid any taxes for 10 years," Reid said.

Later, when asked for proof, Reid offered a pathetic rejoinder: "I have had a number of people tell me that." One wonders how many names were on Reid's McCarthyite "tell" list — were there, as McCarthy used to bluster, 205 names, or perhaps just 57?

When asked again to document the slur, Reid echoed McCarthy perfectly: "The burden should be on him. He's the one I've alleged has not paid any taxes."

Call this the Reid Principle: The maker of scurrilous and unsubstantiated allegations is presumed veracious. The burden of rebutting the charges is borne by the victim of the smear.

Reid's behavior in this and in other cases makes it clear that Democrats see politics as a form of warfare. Conservatives need to wise up.

The Central Axiom of Partisan Politics

According to Charles Krauthammer (Things That Matter, Crown Forum, 2013, p. 64),

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

Robert Paul Wolff unwittingly provides corroboration:

On Easter Sunday, it is only fitting that the reliably despicable Ross Douthat should once again rise from the dead with an incoherently dreadful column on Piketty. I will not try to summarize it. As Aristotle observed [I think], shit has no form, and hence cannot easily be apprehended by reason. You may read it for yourself. I take Douthat's column as a good sign, a harbinger of Spring. When the rats on the sinking ship of capitalism pause in their scramble down the hawsers to acknowledge the reemergence of Marx from the dustbin of history [how's that for a mixed metaphor?], there is hope on this annual celebration of resurrection.

Note that Wolff does not address the content of Douthat's essay, though he does have the decency to link to it. What he does is portray Douthat as a reliably despicable zombie and rat, a shill for capitalism, who has penned an incoherently dreadful column, a piece of shit beneath the apprehension of reason.

Well thank you Professor Wolff for this wonderful Easter Sunday illustration of the Central Axiom and for reminding us once again of how dangerous you leftists are, and, indirectly, how important our Second Amendment rights are.

Dershowitz Contra Leiter

Here

Of ‘Blind Review’ and Pandora’s Box

This is not an April Fool's joke.

Blind review is a standard practice employed by editors of professional journals and organizers of academic conferences. The editor/organizer removes the name of the author from the manuscript before sending it to the referee or referees for evaluation. My present concern is not whether this is a good practice. I am concerned with the phrase that describes it and whether or not this phrase can be reasonably found offensive by anyone. There are those who think that the phrase is offensive and ought to be banned. Shelley Tremain writes,

For the last few years, I have tried to get the APA [American Philosophical Association] to remove the phrase “blind review” from its publications and website. The phrase is demeaning to disabled people because it associates blindness with lack of knowledge and implies that blind people cannot be knowers. Because the phrase is standardly used in philosophy and other academic CFPs [Calls for Papers], it should become recognized as a cause for great concern. In short, use of the phrase amounts to the circulation of language that discriminates. Philosophers should want to avoid inflicting harm in this way.

Let's consider these claims seriatim.

1. "The phrase is demeaning to disabled people . . . " Well, I am a disabled person and the phrase is not demeaning to me. As a result of a birth defect I hear in only one ear. And of course there are innumerable people who are disabled in different ways who will not find the phrase demeaning.

2. " . . . because it associates blindness with lack of knowledge and implies that blind people cannot be knowers." This is not just false but silly. No one thinks that blind people cannot be knowers or that knowers cannot be blind.

Besides, it makes no sense to say that a phrase associates anything with anything. A foolish person who is precisely not thinking, but associating, might associate blindness with ignorance, but so what? People associate the damndest things.

To point out the obvious: if the name has been removed from the mansucript, then the referee literally cannot see it. This is not to say that the referee is blind, or blind with respect to the author's name: he could see it if it were there to see. 'Blind review' means that the reviewer is kept in the dark as to the identity of the author. That's all!

3. ". . . it should become recognized as a cause for great concern." Great concern? This is a wild exaggeration even if this issue is of some minor concern. I say, however, that it is of no concern. No one is demeaned or slighted or insulted or mocked or ridiculed by the use of the phrase in question.

4. ". . . use of the phrase amounts to the circulation of language that discriminates." One could argue that the practice of blind review discriminates against those who have made a name for themselves. But that is the only discrimination in the vicinity. I said at the top that this post is no joke. What is risible, however, is that anyone would find 'blind review' to be discriminatory against blind people.

5. "Philosophers should want to avoid inflicting harm in this way." This presupposes that the use of the phrase 'blind review' inflicts harm. This is just silly. It would be like arguing that the use of 'black hole' inflicts harm on black people because its use associates blacks with holes or with hos (whores).

In the early-to-mid '80s I attended an APA session organized by a group that called itself PANDORA: Philosophers Against the Nuclear Destruction of Rational Animals. One of the weighty topics that came up at this particular meeting was the very name 'Pandora.' Some argued that the name is sexist on the ground that it might remind someone of Pandora's Box, which of course has nothing to do with the characteristic female orifice, but in so reminding them might be taken as a slighting of that orifice. ('Box' is crude slang for the orifice in question.) I pointed out in the meeting that the name is just an acronym, and has nothing to do either with Pandora's Box or the characteristic female orifice. My comment made no impression on the politically correct there assembled. Later the outfit renamed itself Concerned Philosophers for Peace ". . . because of sexist and exclusionary aspects of the acronym." (See here)

Take the High Road with Liberals?

When liberals are up to their usual scumbaggery ought one take the high road with them, patiently making one's case in gentlemanly fashion and rebutting theirs, assuming there is one, all the while ignoring their insults and slanders? In The Liberal Slandering of Paul Ryan Peter Wehner takes seriously and replies earnestly to the mouthings of the race-baiter Paul Krugman and others. But slanderous scum like Krugman are beneath serious reply and it is arguable that replying in measured tones only gives them a credibility they don't deserve.

Once you grasp that it is a war, and that liberals will say anything no matter how absurd, then you will appreciate that mockery and derision are much more effective means of opposing them. But you must also provide solid arguments for the fence-sitters. In Six Arguments Only a Liberal Believe, John Hawkins supplies just the right admixture of mockery and derision to his substantive point-making.

I'm all for civility, but civility is for the civil only.

Double Trouble from Strange Bedfellows: Leftist-Islamist Collaboration

Required reading

See my Islamism category for more on this and related topics.

Tony Flood on Governor Brewer’s Capitulation

Commenting on a NYT piece on Brewer's capitulation to the anti-liberty forces of political correctness, long-time correspondent Anthony Flood writes:

“Religious liberty is a core American and Arizona value,” Governor Brewer philosophized, but “so is no discrimination.” The syntactically challenged governor, or was it her ghost-writer?, evaded the implication that, should the two conflict, religious liberty must give way to "no discrimination."

To elicit the desired Pavlovian response, "discrimination," a "boo" word, replaced "freedom of association," once a "yay" word. The Christian photographer or baker who invites a same-sex couple to seek services elsewhere is slandered as the moral equivalent of a Jim Crow-era bigot. "No discrimination" — which no American founding document honors — is the inviolable dogma of post-Christian Humanism, itself a species of religion.

The LGBT "civil rights movement," apparently bored with mere "tolerance," now demands participation by Christians in the celebration of what they deem morally abhorrent if they are "asked." If they refuse, they can risk prosecution or shutter their businesses. Humanism's propagandists, including many deluded but professing Christians, get to label their opponents "bullies" and "bigots." Meanwhile, AG Holder brazenly suggests to his state counterparts that they need not enforce statutes they swore an oath to uphold but which, in their superior wisdom, deem indefensible, particularly laws that defend traditional marriage.

Let God be true, but every man a liar (Rom 3:4). He will not be mocked (Gal 6:7)

See my Liberal Fascism: The Floral Variation