Category: Leftism and Political Correctness

Voter Identification and Voter Suppression

Voter ID

The controversy over voter ID is a fascinating  one because it highlights the deep divide between contemporary conservatives and contemporary liberals.  That this non-issue is debated at all shows that the Left is bereft of common sense.

Anyone with common sense ought to be able to appreciate that voting must be conducted in an orderly manner, and that only citizens who have registered to vote and have satisfied the minimal requirements of age, etc., are to be allowed into the voting booth. Given the possibility of fraud, it is therefore necessary to verify the identities of those who present themselves at the polling place. To do this, voters must be required to present a government-issued photo ID card, a driver's license being only one example of such. It is a reasonable requirement and any reasonable person should be able to see it as one.

Too many liberals, however, see these common-sense requirements as acts of voter suppression, as witness this astonishing outburst from Jennifer Granholm, former governor of Michigan:

In November, five million eligible voters will find it harder to exercise their rights in America — 150 voter suppression laws have been introduced in 30 state legislatures across the country.

The most common tactics: requiring photo ID, restricting registration drives, limiting early voting and imposing onerous residency requirements. Who do these laws most directly affect? The poor, the elderly, minorities and the young. And how do those groups typically vote? Democratic.

Let's consider photo ID.  For Granholm, requiring such ID is a form of voter suppression.  How's that for hyperbole?  Does she call it bank withdrawal suppression when check cashers are required to produce ID?  The other day I withdrew a sum of money from a checking account in excess of what is obtainable from an ATM machine.  I was asked to show my driver's license.  Was that an infringement of my right to access my own funds?  Of course not.  The demand was eminently reasonable even though I am known at the bank in question.  Similarly with the photo ID requirement at the polling place.  Examples like this can be multiplied indefinitely.  See the above graphic.

Some liberals say that voter fraud is rare.  Maybe, maybe not.  In any case, irrelevant.  There is a principle at stake.  Besides, how many people lack ID?  Without ID one simply cannot function in society.  To exploit and adapt a slogan of the Harvard logician, Willard Quine, "No [social] entity without [social] identity."  You're a nonentity without  ID.  So when a liberal says that voter fraud is rare, reply, "So is lack of ID.  Since almost everyone has it, almost no one is excluded from voting by the ID requirement."

Since liberals don't have even one cogent argument against photo ID, we are justified in psychologizing their opposition to common-sense requirements.  Their opposition is rooted in a desire to win by any means, including fraud.  As lefties, they believe the end justifies the means.  They see themselves as the noble standard-bearers of equality against their disgusting, evil, SIXHRB opponents.  (SIXHRB: sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, bigoted. HT: Dennis Prager.)

By the way, Governor Granholm is now on the faculty at University of California, Berkeley.  Surprise! 

Companion post:  I Was Forced to Show My Papers!

Left-Wing Racial McCarthyism

Contemporary liberals hunt for racists the way McCarthyites in the '50s and early '60s hunted for commies, and they use their terms of opprobrium with the same sort of  irresponsible semantic latitude. You could say that they are extreme semantic latitudinarians when it comes to their verbal bludgeons of choice.  But a witch hunt by any other name is still a witch hunt.

Elizabeth Warren: Undocumented Injun

Elizabeth 'Fauxcahontas' Warren, Cherokee maiden, diversity queen of the Harvard Lore Law School, and author of the cookbook Pow Wow Chow, is being deservedly and diversely raked over the coals.  Howie Carr, White and Wrong.  NRO, Paleface.  Michael Barone, Racial Preferences: Unfair and Ridiculous. Excerpt:

Let's assume the 1894 document is accurate. That makes Warren one-thirty-second Native American. George Zimmerman, the Florida accused murderer, had a black grandmother. That makes him a quarter black, four times as black as Warren is Indian, though The New York Times describes him as a "white Hispanic."

In the upside-down world of the liberal, the 'white Hispanic' George Zimmerman is transmogrified into a redneck and the lily-white Elizabeth Warren into a redskin.

The Left's diversity fetishism is so preternaturally boneheaded that one has to wonder whether calm critique has any place at all in responses to it.  But being somewhat naive, I have been known to try rational persuasion.  See Diversity and the Quota Mentality for one example.

First John Derbyshire, then Naomi Riley

John Fund in Censoring Naomi Riley comments on the latter's dismissal by the The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Earlier this week, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the trade paper for faculty members and administrators in universities, fired Naomi Schaefer Riley, a paid blogger for its website. Her crime? She had the courage to respond to a Chronicle story called “Black Studies: ‘Swaggering Into the Future,’” which stated that “young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline.” The article used five Ph.D. candidates as examples of those “rewriting the history of race.” Riley looked at the subject areas of the five proposed dissertations and concluded that they were “obscure at best . . . a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap at worst.”

John Fund goes on to make a number of obvious points in protest of the illiberalism of contemporary liberals.

But Fund neglects to comment on the irony of publishing his piece in National Review Online, which recently defenestrated John Derbyshire.  (My posts on Derbyshire are in the Race category.)  What makes it worse is that NRO is supposedly a conservative publication.  We have a supposedly conservative publication publishing a piece that criticizes The Chronicle for dumping a blogger who bravely  spoke her mind and expressed some unpleasant truths that many acknowledge but few have the courage to express.  But this same publication did exactly the same thing to John Derbyshire.  We expect craven acquiescence to race-baiters from politically correct liberals, but not from so-called conservatives such as Rich Lowry and Andrew McCarthy.

Why doesn't Fund stick up for Derbyshire? (Perhaps he has in some other venue.)  I could be wrong, but Derbyshire is a more substantial commentator on the passing scene than the blogger Riley.

‘Blacklisted’ Blacklisted

Here: "POLICE chiefs have banned IT staff from using the word blacklist over fears it is RACIST." (Via VFR)

This sort of thing is insane, of course. And so I suspect that to argue against it is foolish: it only lends credibility to a view that ought to be mocked and derided. 

But I do argue it out here.  One late-night comic lampooned the 'crispy critter' tanning lady (who brought her child into the tanning booth with her) by saying that the she is so dark it's racist!  That's the way to go.  You PeeCee liberals are so stupid it's racist! What is the antecedent of the last two occurrences of 'it'?  Don't worry, we be in PeeCee land now.  We don't need to talk no sense.

Cosmologists are going to have to be careful what with their talk of black holes.  Someone might take that as 'code' for 'black ho' a phrase that in PeeCee logic (and no, I'm not talking about the propositional calculus) implies that all black females are whores.

Tanning%20Lady

PC Conservative Andrew McCarthy’s Lame Response to John Derbyshire

It is well known by now that NRO has cut its ties with John Derbyshire ('Derb') over the latter's publication in another venue of The Talk: Nonblack Version.  Both Rich Lowry and Andrew McCarthy have commented on this severing of ties and both sets of comments are unbelievably lame.  Here is the substance (or rather 'substance') of McCarthy's response (numerals added):

[1] We believe in the equal dignity and presumption of equal decency toward every person — no matter what race, no matter what science tells us about comparative intelligence, and no matter what is to be gleaned from crime statistics. [2] It is important that research be done, that conclusions not be rigged, and that we are at liberty to speak frankly about what it tells us. [3] But that is not an argument for a priori conclusions about how individual persons ought to be treated in various situations — or for calculating fear or friendship based on race alone. [4] To hold or teach otherwise is to prescribe the disintegration of a pluralistic society, to undermine the aspiration of e pluribus unum.

Ad [1].  Well, don't we all (including Derb) believe in the equal dignity of human persons regardless of race, creed, national origin, sex, age?  Is McCarthy suggesting that Derb rejects this principle?   But of course equality of rights is not the same as empirical equality.  That people are not empirically equal is a factual claim in two senses of 'factual': it is a non-normative claim, and it is a true claim.  That people have equal rights is a normative claim. The non-normative and normative claims are logically independent.  One cannot infer empirical equality from normative equality.  More importantly, one cannot infer normative inequality from empirical inequality.  For example, human infants are pretty much helpless, but this fact does not detract from their equal right to life.  Women are on average shorter than men, and less muscular, but these facts do not detract from their status as persons, as rights-possessors.  90 year-olds tend to be more frail than 60 year-olds, but this fact does not entail that a 90 year-old is less of a person, has a lesser normative status, than a 60 year-old. 

Ad [2].  Who could disagree with this bromide?

Ad [3].  It is in his third sentence where McCarthy ascends into Cloud Cuckoo Land.  Suppose it is a fact that "Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery."  A fact is a fact.  There are no false facts, and there are no racist facts.  There are racial facts (facts about race), but a racial fact is not a racist fact.  Now suppose I encounter at night, in a bad part of town, an "individual person" in McCarthy's phrase whom I do not know, a person who is young, male, black, and dressed gangsta-style.  His dark glasses prevent me from seeing his eyes and judging his sobriety.  His deep pockets might conceal a pistol.  Would I be justified in using statistical common sense and avoiding said individual?  Of course.  The guy might be harmless, but I do not know that.  I do know that he fits the profile of an individual who could cause me some serious trouble.  Common sense dictates that I give him a wide berth just as I would with a drunken Hells (no apostrophe) Angel exiting a strip joint.  There are no black Hells Angels, by the way.

Does that mean that I don't consider the black man or the biker to have rights equal to mine?  No. It means that  I understand that we are not mere rights-possessors or Kantian noumenal agents, but also possessors of animal bodies and socially formed (and mal-formed) psyches and that these latter facts induce empirical inequalities of various sorts.

Am I drawing an a priori  conclusion when I avoid the black guy?  Of course not.  My reasoning is a posteriori and inductive.  I am reasoning from certain perceived facts: race (not skin color!), behavior, dress, location, time of day, etc. to a conclusion that is rendered  probable (not certain) by these facts.  And note that in a situation like this one does not consider "race alone" in McCarthy's phrase.  If I considered "race alone" then there would be no difference between the dude I have just described and Condoleeza Rice.

Is my inductive reasoning and consequent avoidance behavior morally censurable?  Of course not.  After all, I have a moral duty to attend to my own welfare.  (See Kant on duties to oneself.)  If anything, my reasoning and behavior are morally obligatory.  And I am quite sure that Andrew McCarthy would reason and behave in the same way in the same circumstances.

Ad [4].  What McCarthy is saying here is nonsense and beneath commentary.  But I will point out the tension between calling for a "pluralistic society" while invoking the phrase e pluribus unum, "out of many, one."  One wonders how long before McCarthy cries for more "diversity." 

The Pee Cee conservative is an interesting breed of cat.  We shall have to study him more carefully.

Derbyshire’s ‘Racism’

I got wind of Derb's defenestration, and the concomitant crapstorm of Internet commentary, a little late, but I've been making up for lost time.  I found this curious passage over at RedState, a self-professedly conservative website (emphasis added):

Derbyshire likes to pepper his racist rants with “facts” that generally consist of social studies that are subject to numerous interpretational biases. To me, the question as to whether these studies are accurate or correct is uninteresting and irrelevant – a central tenet of decency demands that every human being is entitled to be evaluated on his or her own merits regardless of what social science may say about any group (racial, cultural, religious or otherwise) to which he or she might belong. It is this very basis which Derbyshire rejects, and that is what makes him (and has always made him) a racist. He is not, as his defenders at the execrable Taki mag say, confronting the world with uncomfortable truths, he is proudly declaring himself to be a racist and arguing that it is correct to be racist. This, I submit, is something that all decent people should reject.

This is exceedingly curious because the author seems to be saying that Derb is a racist whether or not the facts he adduces in support of the advice he gives to his children are indeed facts. But surely there are no racist facts.  A racial fact is not a racist fact.  So if the facts Derb adduces are facts, then his adducing them cannot be racist.  It therefore cannot be irrelevant whether what Derb calls facts are indeed facts: that is rather the nub of issue.

Here is one of the facts he adduces:  Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery. Here is another: Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

Now suppose that these are indeed facts.  Do they justify the advice he gives his kids?  Part of the advice is:

(10) Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

It should be obvious that the facts do justify the advice.  Derb is a father and he is talking to his children.  Being children, they lack experience of the world and the degree of good judgment that comes from protracted encounter with the world and its ways. Caring about his children, he advises: If all you have to go on is knowledge of the mean differences, then avoid situations where there is a large number of blacks unknown to you.

There is nothing racist about this.  It is excellent paternal advice.  To be racist, the facts Derb adduces would have to be non-facts. It silly in excelsis to suppose that it is irrelevant whther the sociological facts Derb cites are indeed facts.  (Please avoid the pleonastic 'true facts.')

The author above speaks of a "central tenet of decency" according to which every human being is entitled to be evaluated on his own merits regardless of group affiliation and regardless of what we know about the group.  That too is silly.  Consider the Hells [no apostrophe!] Angels.  We know quite a lot about this motorcycle gang.  If we were to follow the "central tenet of decency" we would have to leave out of consideration this knowledge in our encounters with members of the gang.  But this would be very foolish indeed.  For example, suppose all I know about Tiny is that he is a Hells Angel and what I can know by observing him at the end of the bar. (E.g., he is covered with tattoos, muscular, about 220 lbs, 6' 2" in height, and about 35 years of age.)  Knowing just this, I know enough to avoid (eye or other) contact with him.  For I know that if an altercation should ensue, his fellow Angels would join in the fight (that's part of their code) and I would be lucky to escape with my life.

Now unless you are a very stupid liberal you will not misunderstand what I am saying.  I am not saying that blacks as a group are as criminally prone as Hells Angels as a group.  I'm showing that the above decency principle  is incoherent.  One cannot abstract from group characteristics when all you have to go on are group characteristics and immediate sensory data.

Racism?  What racism?  And what do you mean by 'racist' anyway?  Derb adduces some facts that bear upon race and you call him a racist?  Then please tell us what you mean by the term. 

 

Derbyshire’s Defenestration

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.    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 wihout 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?

‘Institutionalized Racism’

Liberals love the phrase, 'institutionalized racism.'  A  racist society it is in which so many blacks achieve high political office despite the fact that blacks are a small minority of the population.  Indeed, we have a black president.  What better proof that racism is inscribed into our institutional structure?  But then again, Obama is only half black.  If George Zimmerman of Trayvon Martin fame is a 'white Hispanic' as maintained in the Solomonic pages of the New York Times, then, by parity of reasoning, Barack Obama is a 'white black.'  Is that perhaps the proof of institutional racism?  You see, if the USA were not institutionally racist, then we would have a black-black president by now.

Of course I am being sarcastic.  In dealing with notions as preternaturally idiotic as those of liberals, mockery, derision, sarcasm and the like are more effective than patient argument.  Reason and argument are effective only with those who inhabit the plane of reason. There is no point in talking sense to the denizens of the planet Unsinn.   Or if you are not in the mood to mock and deride them, if you are feeling charitable, then offer your help and therapy.  Those who are beneath reason do not need refutation; they need therapy.  They need care.  And we conservatives do care.  We want you liberals to be happy and successful and less stupid.  Of course we are honest enough to admit that our motive is partially selfish: the less stupid and unsuccessful and unhappy you are, the better it will be for us.

Actually, what we need is a 'proctology' of the liberal.  We need to understand how so many heads can inhabit that region where the sun doesn't shine.  But understanding is not enough: we need practical methods of extraction.  My fear, however, is that even an army of proctologists, each member of which enjoys the life span of a Methuselah, would not be able to bring the shrunken pate of even one liberal into the light of day.

And that's a pity. (I have successfully resisted the temptation to engage in scatological alliteration.)

For an example of the sort of idiocy I am excoriating, see here; for an antidote, go here.

On the Misuse of ‘Unilateral’

The following  post from the old blog written 20 July 2005 makes a point that bears repeating.

John Nichols of the The Nation appeared on the hard-Left show, "Democracy Now," on the morning of 2 September 2004. Like many libs and lefties, he misused 'unilateral' to mean 'without United Nations   support.' In this sense, coalition operations against Saddam Hussein's regime were 'unilateral' despite the the fact that said operations were precisely those of a coalition of some thirty countries.

The same willful mistake was made by his boss Victor Navasky on 17 July 2005 while being interviewed by David Frum on C-Span 2.

Words have established meanings. Intellectually honest people respect those meanings. Too many libs and lefties do not. Out to win at all costs, they will do anything to secure their ends, including hijacking the terms of a debate and piloting them to some Left-coast destination.

When they are not corrupting established words, they are inventing question-begging epithets such as 'homophobia,' and 'Islamophobia.'  A phobia is an irrational fear.  There is nothing irrational about fear of radical Islam.  And there neeedn't be anything fearful or irrational about opposition to homosexual practices.

Why Must the Left be Totalitarian?

A reader inquires,

I was wondering if you could expand on a statement you made in Political Correctness and Gender Neutral Language . . . . The statement is as follows: "The Left is totalitarian by its very nature and so it cannot leave any sphere of human concern unpoliticized." I wholeheartedly agree with your statement, but I was wondering if you would explain why the Left must be totalitarian. All I know right now is that it is, and has been from at least the days of Woodrow Wilson and especially FDR.

A huge and daunting topic, but I'll hazard a little sketch.

My statement telescopes two subclaims and an inference. The first subclaim is that the Left is totalitarian, while the second is that it totalitarian by its very nature (as opposed to accidentally). From these two subclaims the conclusion is drawn that the Left cannot (as opposed to does not) leave any sphere of human concern unpoliticized. 

1. Is the Left totalitarian? The answer to this depends on what is meant by 'totalitarian.' The word is derived from the Italian totalitario, meaning complete or absolute. The original connection is with Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism. Mussolini referred to his regime as lo stato totalitario, the totalitarian state. But the term 'totalitarian' came also to be applied to Hitler's National Socialism and to Communism. Roughly, 'totalitarian' characterizes those systems of political organization in which the state recognizes no limits to its authority and aims to regulate every aspect of public and private life. By extension, the term applies to political movements and ideologies.

When I say that the Left is totalitarian, I mean that it is a political movement that moves us away from individual liberty and the unregulated pluralism of civil society toward state control of every aspect of our public and private lives, including state control of the economy. This totalitarian drift is readily discernible in the policies of the Obama administration. For example, the Obama health care initiative, with its so-called 'individual mandate,' will increase government interference in health care delivery and reduce individual options. Individuals will be forced by law to carry medical and dental insurance whether they want it or not, whether they need it or not.   The government, which is not subject to market discipline, will be pitted against private sector health insurers driving up their premiums and driving many of them out of business. The rest of us will be stuck with rationing and inferior care provided by a demoralized corps of doctors who will have no incentive to work hard and long because of government interference with their pay schedules and every other aspect of their professional lives. The drift is toward socialized medicine, i.e., total state control of health care delivery.

Another example is the threat of the reinstatement the Fairness Doctrine or something like it, the aim of which is to squelch dissent in the name of 'fairness.' Examples can be multiplied.

2. But must the Left be totalitarian? Well, what does the Left stand for, and against?

A. It is against religion as against an opiate that promises 'pie in the sky' when 'pie in the future' is attainable, they falsely maintain, by collective human effort orchestrated by a vanguard that sets itself apart from, and above, the masses. Being against religion, the Left is against something that eludes totalitarian control. Religion belongs to private life and so must be opposed as one of the factors that prevent the Left from gaining total control. Leftists in the USA battle religion by way of extermist interpretations of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, and in other ways.

B. The Left is against free enterprise and private property, which are the foundations of individual liberty.

C. The Left is against the family as the fundamental building-block of society.

D. The Left is for uniform indoctrination of the population. E.g., it opposes school vouchers and home schooling.

E. The Left is for central planning 'from the top' by an elite that seeks to equalize by, among other things, redistributing wealth via the tax code. The irony, of course, is that to implement their egalitarian schemes, the elite must be unequal in power and privileges to those beneath them whom they seek to make equal.  Their pursuit of the pseudo-ideal, material equality, is predicated upon an inequality which, of course, will no more 'wither away' than Lenin's Communist state, but will instead become ever more entrenched until it collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions — which is what  happened to that 'workers' paradise' and hope of humanity, the USSR.

This is a very rough and incomplete sketch. Reams could be written on each of these subtopics.

Words Banned From Tests in NYC Schools

Feel-good liberalism at its best worst:

Divorce. Dinosaurs, Birthdays. Religion. Halloween. Christmas. Television. These are a few of the 50-plus words and references the New York City Department of Education is hoping to ban from the city’s standardized tests.

My astute readers do not need to have it explained to them what is wrong with this.  But it is one more example of the triumph of feelings-based Unsinn over thought and sense on the Left and another reason why you should never vote  for a Democrat.

Of course, there are a few Dems who are not completely unhinged .  But unless you know who they are, it is best to be on the safe side and vote for Republicans and Libertarians.