Category: Leftism and Political Correctness

Dissecting Leftism

John Jay Ray blogs on year after year and takes no prisoners.  I went on ego surfari at his site and pulled up a quotation and a reference for which I thank Dr. Ray:

Good comment from Bill Vallicella: "It is difficult to get lefties to appreciate the moral equivalence of the two totalitarian movements because there is a tendency to think that the Commies had good intentions, while the Nazis did not. But this is false: both had good intentions. Both wanted to build a better world by eliminating the evil elements that made progress impossible. Both thought they had located the root of evil, and that the eradication of this root would usher in a perfect world. It is just that they located the root of evil in different places. Nazis really believed that Judentum ist Verbrechertum, as one of their slogans had it, that Jewry is criminality. They saw the extermination of Jews and other Untermenschen as an awful, but necessary, task on the road to a better world. Similarly with the Commie extermination of class enemies".

Bill Vallicella has a post saying that the Left are insensitive to danger. He says this is why they are always pretending that human nnature is good and ignoring the fact that some people can be evil and dangerous. I think it is a bit worse than that. I think Leftist ideologues don't care about reality at all. That's one reason why they often claim that reality does not exist. They are so preoccupied with puffing up their own image and self-esteem that everything else just has to go hang. And anything that threatens that image will simply be denied. They will do and say ANYTHING in order to sound good. Clinically, it is called "Narcissism" and in more extreme cases, it is part of "Psychopathy".

The First Rule of Liberalism

Government failure always justifies more government.

Excerpt from this James Taranto piece:

It's a common refrain among those who lust to increase government's size and power: Every failed measure justifies more of the same. Poverty programs make it harder to escape poverty? We need more poverty programs! Racial preferences heighten racial division? We need more racial preferences! And a diversity manual for every janitor in the country! When ObamaCare ends up driving the costs of medicine up and the quality and availability down, you can bet the people who created that monstrosity will claim it failed only because it didn't go far enough.

Let's generalize this into the First Rule of Liberalism: Government failure always justifies more government. As Obama said today, complaining about Republican pressure to cut spending: "I'd rather be talking about stuff that everybody welcomes–like new programs." Fortunately for the country, the voters don't always agree.

In Debt We Trust

I saw the documentary In Debt We Trust on TV on one of the lefty channels.  Trailer here. It is a typical leftist treatment of the problem of indebtedness, but interesting  nonetheless. One of the people interviewed states that "Society preaches the gospel of shopping." That is the sort of nonsense one  expects to hear from libs and lefties. First of all, there is no such thing as society. To think otherwise is to commit the fallacy of hypostatization.  So if the sentence means anything, it means that  certain people, advertisers primarily, urge people to consume recklessly. No doubt about it. But libs and lefties ignore the main  thing, namely, the individual's ability to resist the siren song of the advertisers. If you are in debt, it is not 'society's' fault; it is your fault. Your ignorance of simple arithmetic and personal finance, and your refusal to control yourself are your responsibility.

Do I 'give a pass' to the predatory credit card companies, the subprime mortage scammers, and the payday loan sharks? No, but if it  weren't for your weakness of will and financial stupidity they wouldn't be able to get a handle on you. Don't blame others, blame  yourself.

If You Are a Conservative, Don’t Talk Like a Liberal

I've made this point before but it bears repeating. We conservatives should never acquiesce in the Left's acts of linguistic vandalism. Battles in the culture war are often lost and won on linguistic   ground. So we ought to resolutely oppose the Left's attempts at linguistic corruption.

Take 'homophobia.'

A phobia is a fear, but not every fear is a phobia. A phobia is an  irrational fear. One who argues against the morality of homosexual practices, or gives reasons for opposing same-sex marriage is precisely — presenting arguments, and not expressing any phobia. The arguments  may or may not be cogent. But they are expressive of reason, and are intended to appeal to the reason of one's interlocutor. To dismiss them as an expression of a phobia show a lack of respect for reason and for the persons who proffer the arguments.

There are former meat-eaters who can make an impressive case against the eating of meat. Suppose that, instead of addressing their arguments, one denounces them as 'carniphobes.' Can you see what is wrong with that? These people have a reasoned position. Their reasoning may be more or less cogent, their premises more or less disputable. But the one thing they are not doing is expressing an irrational fear of eating meat. Many of them like the stuff and dead meat inspires no fear in them whatsoever.

The point should be obvious: 'homophobia' is just as objectionable as 'carniphobia.' People who use words like these are attempting to close off debate, to bury a legitimate issue beneath a crapload of PeeCee jargon. So it is not just that 'homophobe' and 'homophobia' are
question-begging epithets; they are question-burying epithets.

And of course 'Islamophobia'  and cognates are other prime examples.  Once again, a phobia is an irrational fear.  But fear of radical Islam is not at all irrational.  You are a dolt if us use these terms, and a double dolt if you are a conservative.

Language matters.

  

On Black Reparations

Warning to liberals: clear thinking, moral clarity, and political incorrectness up ahead! If you consider any part of the following to be 'racist' or 'hateful' then you are in dire need, not of refutation, but of psychotherapy.  Please seek it for your own good.

There is no question but that slavery is a great moral evil. But are American blacks owed reparations for the slavery that was officially ended by the ratification of the 13th Amendment of the U. S. Constitution over 145 years ago on 6 December 1865? I cannot see that any rational case for black reparations can be made. Indeed, it seems to me that a very strong rational case can be made against black reparations. The following argument seems to me decisive:

1. All of the perpetrators of the crimes associated with slavery in the U.S. are dead.
2. All of the victims of the crimes associated with slavery in the U.S. are dead.
3. Only those who are victims of a crime are entitled to reparations for the crime, and only those who are the perpetrators of a crime are obliged to pay reparations for it.
Therefore
4. No one now living is entitled to receive reparations for the crimes associated with slavery in the U.S., and no one now living is obliged to pay reparations.  

Continue reading “On Black Reparations”

Further Left Than Chomsky

"There is no further left than Chomsky.  Further left than Chomsky is Stalin."  (Dennis Prager,  just now, on his radio show.)  And Chomsky gets paid to speak on college campuses, he doesn't get pie in the face, and doesn't need a body guard.  But Ann Coulter and David Horowitz need body guards.  (Prager made these obvious points as well.)

There is scumbaggery on the Right, but it is far, far worse on the Left.  Anyone who disagrees with this I would consider so delusional as to be not worth talking to.

Capital Punishment and Deterrence

Bill Keezer e-mails:

With respect to capital punishment: When I was a lab-tech at Ball State University, one of the professors was telling me about a demonstration of static electricity he did at the state prison in Pendleton, IN. He was using a Van de Graaff generator to create long, spectacular sparks and light neon tubes off the fingers of volunteers. The key thing in what he told me was a con asked him, “Can you fix the chair?” meaning of course could he prevent the electric chair from killing a person.

If the death penalty is not a deterrent, then the question is meaningless.

Right.  Of course the death penalty is a deterrent.  The only interesting question is why liberals don't or won't admit it.  Part of the explanation is that liberals won't admit that criminals are for the most part rational, not insane, and that there is such a thing as evil, and what it presupposes, freedom of the will.  It is characteristic of liberals to speak of murders as senseless, as in the case of the mother of one of the Long Island pharmacy shooting victims.

But the murders made all the sense in the world.  Dead men tell no tales.  That piece of folk wisdom supplies an excellent reason to kill witnesses in the absence of any strong incentive not to do so.   In one sense of 'rational,' a rational agent is one who chooses means conducive to the end in view.  If the end in view is to score some swag and not get caught, then it is perfectly reasonable to kill all witnesses to the crime especially given the laxity of a criminal justice system in which the likelihood of severe punishment is low. 

Liberals are  promiscuous in their use of the 'disease model.'  For example, they typically believe that alcoholism is a disease, a view refuted by Herbert Fingarette in Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (University of California Press, 1988).  They also misuse the word 'addiction' in connection with nictoine use, as if one could be addicted to smoking.  Suppose you smoke a couple packs a day and I offer you a million dollars if you go one month without smoking.  Will you be able to do it?  Of course.  End of discussion. For more on the noble weed, see Alcohol,Tobacco, and Firearms.  It is the same on Planet Liberal with criminals: they must be 'sick,' or 'insane.' Nonsense.  Most are eminently sane, just evil. 

And because criminals are most of them sane and love life, the death penalty is a deterrent.  That is just common sense and there is a strong, albeit defeasible, presumption in favor of common sense views, a presumption that places the burden of proof on those who would deny it.  I will be told that we need empirical studies.  Supposing I grant that, who will undertake them?  Liberal sociologists and criminologists?  Do you think there just might be a good reason to suspect their objectivity?   In any case, here are references to studies which show that CP is a deterrent.

But whether CP is a deterrent is not the logically prior question, which is:  what does justice demand?  Deterrent or not, certain crimes demand the death penalty.  Fiat justitia, ruat caelum.

The Absurdity of Gender Feminism

Christina Hoff Sommers usefully distinguishes between equity feminism and gender feminism.  I am all for the former, but I find the the latter preposterous.  In his chapter on gender in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Penguin 2002, Steven Pinker explains the distinction:

Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.  Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature.  The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety.  The second is that humans possess a single social motive — power — and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised.  The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups — in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender. (p. 341, bolding added)

Do these risible claims need refutation, or are they beneath refutation?  I say the latter, but if you think they are worth refuting, Pinker does the job in detail.

Nonsense, if believed by policy makers, has dire consequences some of which are in evidence in The End of Gender?  (HT: Spencer Case)  Loons, agitating for their 'reforms,' exercise the tyranny of the minority. 

Addendum (6/26):  The dark and ugly side of feminism is revealed by Rebecca Walker in How My Mother's Fanatical Views Tore Us Apart. ( HT: Horace Jeffery Hodges. )

Voter ID Again

This was written in September of 2006 and posted on the old blog.  But the topic is back in the news.  My view hasn't changed, so I repost.

WARNING! Polemical post up ahead. Don't like polemics? Don't read it!

More puzzling to me than liberum arbitrium indifferentiae is the question, asked of old, asked now, and ever to be asked, namely, why are liberals so contemptibly obtuse?

The latest example, from the NYT no less, concerns voter indentification. Now anyone with common sense must 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 propensity to 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 such.

It is not enough to present a bank statement or a utility bill for the obvious reason that such a document does not establish one's identity: the statement or bill might have been stolen.

     Missourians who have driver's licenses will have little trouble
     voting, but many who do not will have to go to considerable trouble
     to get special IDs. The supporting documents needed to get these,
     like birth certificates, often have fees attached, so some
     Missourians will have to pay to keep voting. It is likely that many
     people will not jump all of the bureaucratic hurdles to get the
     special ID, and will become ineligible to vote.

Considerable trouble? Bureaucratic hurdles? What silly exaggeration! If one doesn't have a birth certificate, one should get one since one will need it for other purposes. Stop buying lottery tickets for a week and you will have money for any fees that might be charged. In any case, what sort of person has no birth certificate? Presumably, the same people who lack ID. How do they live? How do they cash checks? Where do they live? Under bridges? Are these the sorts of people you want making decisions about matters of moment? Is this the new base of the Democrat Party?

Our editorialist is worried about the few who will not vote because they will not make the minimal effort required to obtain the necessary  ID. It would be better for him to worry about the integrity of the   voting process. The election process must inspire confidence in the citizenry, but it cannot do so unless it is well-regulated. Felons, illegal aliens, and other unqualified individuals cannot be allowed to vote.

The NYT editorialist thinks that supporters of photo ID are out to "to deter voting by blacks, poor people and other groups that are less likely to have driver's licenses." This is slander. Now if this moral cretin of an editorialist wants to engage in this sort of psychologizing, we can easily turn the table on him: the reason Dems want unregulated voting is to make possible voter fraud by illegal aliens, felons, and others, people who are their ticket to power.

We can also call him a racist since he apparently thinks black are so incompetent and inferior as to be unable to secure proper ID.

I Lay in a Supply of Incandescent Light Bulbs

Virginia Postrel writes,

If you want to know why so many Americans feel alienated from their government, you need only go to Target and check out the light bulb aisle. Instead of the cheap commodities of yesteryear, you’ll find what looks like evidence of a flourishing, technology-driven economy.

There are “ultrasoft” bulbs promising “softer soft white longer life” light, domed halogens for “bright crisp light” and row upon row of Energy Smart bulbs — some curled in the by-now- familiar compact fluorescent form, some with translucent shells that reveal only hints of the twisting tubes within.

It seems to be a dazzling profusion of choice. But, at least in California, where I live, this plenitude no longer includes what most shoppers want: an inexpensive, plain-vanilla 100-watt incandescent bulb. Selling them is now illegal here. The rest of the country has until the end of the year to stock up before a federal ban kicks in. (I have a stash in storage.) Over the next two years, most lower-wattage incandescents will also disappear.

Read the rest.

Light Banned on the Left Coast in the People's Republic of Californication!  It figures. It's sad to see what has become of my native state.  But I am fortunate to flourish in Arizona where bright sun and hard rock and self-reliant liberty-lovers have a suppressive effect on the miasma of leftists.  So with a firm resolve to stick it to the nanny-staters I headed out this afternoon in my Jeep Liberty to Costco where not a single incandescent was to be had.  So I went to Lowe's and cleaned 'em out.  I bought four 24-packs.  Three packs were Sylvania 60W 130V A19's @ $10.03 per pack  and one pack was Sylvania 100W 130V A19's @12.02 per pack.  Total: $42.11 for 96 bulbs. That comes to less than 44 cents per bulb.

The 130 volt rating means that I will get plenty of life out of these bulbs at the expense of a negligible reduction in illumination.  A voltage check at a wall socket revealed that I'm running just a tad below 120 V.

Next Saturday I'll pay a visit to Home Despot Depot and add to my stock. 

And now I am remined of what were supposed to have been Goethe's last words: Licht, Licht, Mehr Licht!  Light, light, more light!

Ladderman Revisited

This post dated 17 November 2004 is from Ladderman  and ought to be preserved.  So I reproduce it here.

Maverick Philosopher posted a short sharp reply to the now common leftist claim that America is becoming a "theocracy" under President Bush. Excerpt:

"Hostility to religion, especially institutionalized religion, is a defining characteristic of the Left. We've known that since 1789. What is surprising, and truly bizarre, is the Left's going soft on militant Islam, the most virulent strain of religious bigotry ever to appear. It threatens all of their values. But their obsession with dissent is so great, dissent at all costs and against everything established, that they simply must denounce Bush and Co. as potential theocrats, all the while cozying up to militant Islam."

That must have had an awful lot of truth in it as it even got a bite from Ladderman, who was paranoid (or egotistical) enough to think that the post referred to him, even though he was not mentioned in it.

Ladderman's only substantial point in reply, however, is that some Christians WANT to have their values (such as opposition to abortion) enshrined in legislation. Wow! What news! You can certainly rely on Ladderman for the scoops! Many Christians have wanted that from the year dot but it does NOT mean that they are getting it or are going to get it. Wanting isn't getting and Bush's policy as given in the Presidential debates is thoroughly centrist: He wants to make alternatives to abortion more attractive but he certainly has no policy of getting abortion banned.

And in fact American law generally has undoubtedly been becoming more secular with every passing year. The Christian fundamentalists have LOST the battle on things like abortion, public prayer, public display of religious symbols and prohibition of homosexuality. But Ladderman (Leiter) is only a Law professor so I guess he hasn't noticed.

If he went to Saudi Arabia or Iran he would find out what a real theocracy is like. Ladderman's bile has totally cut him off from reality.

Ed Schultz Plays the Race Card

Schultz race card

 Ed Schultz:  "The Republican Party Stands for Racism."

For more examples of leftist scumbaggery, see my Race category.

Another example of why calls for civility are silly.  You must not be civil to moral scum.  You must denounce them and their lies.  When they lie about us we must tell the truth about them.  Every time.  For they believe in the Communist principle of the Big Lie: tell a big enough lie, repeat it enough times, and people will believe it.

 Michelle  Malkin: "The race card is not the last refuge of liberal scoundrels but the first refuge."