Category: Leftism and Political Correctness

The Wages of Appeasement

The_wages_of_appeasement

I am right now listening to Michael Medved interview Bruce S. Thornton, a colleague of Victor Davis Hanson, and author of The Wages of Appeasement.   Here is a Front Page interview with Thornton.  Excerpt:

MT: Could you talk a bit about one of the recurring themes among the three historical examples you write about in the book: a crippling failure of imagination “to see beyond the pretexts and professed aims of the adversary and recognize his true goals, no matter how bizarre or alien to our own way of thinking”?

BT: We in the West assume our ideals and goods are universal. They are, but only potentially: there are many alternatives to our way of living and governing ourselves, most obviously Islam and its totalizing social-political-economic order, sharia law. Suffering from this myopia, we fail to see those alternatives or take them seriously, usually dismissing them as compensations for material or political goods such as prosperity or democracy.

Worse yet, our enemies are aware of this weakness, and are adept at telling us what we want to hear, and using our own ideals as masks for their own agendas. Just look at the misinterpretations of the protestors in Egypt and the Muslim Brothers, not just from liberals but from many conservatives, who have been duped by the use of vague terms like “freedom” or “democracy.”

An important factor in this bad habit is our own inability to take religion seriously. Since religion is mainly a private affair, a lifestyle choice and source of private therapeutic solace, we can’t imagine that there are people so passionate about spiritual aims that they will murder and die in the pursuit of those aims.

I would add to these excellent points the observation that  the failure to take religion seriously is one of the worst mistakes of the New Atheists.  Being both atheists and leftists, they cannot take religion seriously.  (By contrast, most conservative atheists, though atheists, appreciate the value and importance of religion in human life.)  The New Atheists do not appreciate how deep reach the roots of religion into the human psyche.  And so, like the benighted John Lennon, they "imagine no religion" as if their imagining picks out a real possibility.  They fancy that a change in material conditions will cause religion to evaporate.  Pure Marxist folly, I say.  Man does not live by bread alone.  He wants more, whether or not there is anything more.  He wants meaning and purpose, whether there is meaning and purpose.  He is a metaphysical animal whether he likes it or not, a fact to which every mosque, temple, church and shrine testifies.

Soul Food

People are generally aware of the importance of good nutrition, physical exercise and all things health-related. They understand that what they put into their bodies affects their physical health.  Underappreciated is a truth just as, if not more important: that what one puts into one's mind affects one's mental and spiritual health. The soul has its foods and its poisons just as the body does. This   simple truth, known for centuries, goes unheeded while liberals fall all over each other climbing aboard the various environmental and health bandwagons. 

Second-hand smoke the danger of which is negligible much exercises our leftist pals while the soul-destroying toxicity of the mass 'entertainment' media concerns them not at all.

Why are those so concerned with physical toxins so tolerant of cultural toxins? This is another example of what I call misplaced moral enthusiasm. You worry about global warming and sidestream smoke when you give no thought to the soul, its foods, and its poisons? You liberals are a strange breed of cat, crouching behind the First Amendment, quick to defend every form of cultural pollution under the rubric 'free speech.'

Universal Health Care

I'm for it: I want everyone to have health care. But the issue is not whether it would be good for all to have adequate health care, the issue is how to approach this goal. I can't see that increasing   government involvement in health care delivery is the way to go.

Phrases like 'universal health care' and 'affordable health care' obscure the real issue. Who doesn't want affordable health care for all? If you visit the Democrat Party website you will see that they are for 'affordable health care.' That's highly informative, isn't it? It is like saying that one is for peace and against war. Except for the few in whom bellicosity is as it were hard-wired, everyone wants peace. The issue, however, is how to achieve it and  maintain it without surrendering that which is of equal or greater value such as freedom, self-respect, and honor.  And there is where the real arguments begin.

Or it is like saying that one is for gun control. Almost everyone wants gun control. I want it, the late Charlton Heston wanted it, Charles Schumer wants it. That's not the issue. The issue concerns the nature and extent of gun control.  Or it is like saying one is for government.  Except for a handful of anarchists, everyone is for government including libertarians and conservatives.  The issue is not whether we will have government.  The issue concerns it size and scope, power and limits.  When slanderous leftists like Charles Schumer portray conservatives as anti-government we need to call them on their lies. 

And note that health care affordability is only one value. Availability and quality are two others. If health care is provided to all 'for free' just what sorts of care will they receive and what will be the quality of that care? What good is a 'free' hip replacement if you have to wait two years in pain before you receive it? Or a 'free' quadruple bypass operation if you are dead by the time your number is called?  The Canadian snowbirds I talk to don't give me much encouragement as to the desirability of socialized medicine.

Availability of health care  is also affected by the willingness of young people to submit themselves to the rigors of medical school, internship and day-to-day practice.  Remove the incentives (high pay, high social standing, professional status and independence) and you can expect fewer entrants into the field.  Everyone's being insured will not 'insure' that there will be an adequate number of properly trained health care prroviders.

And 'free' to whom? To the unproductive, no doubt. But why should hard-working middle-class types subsidize the bad behavior of those who refuse to take care of themselves?  The primary provider of health care is the (adult) individual, who provides it for himself by taking care of himself: by eating right, getting proper rest, exercising, etc.

The problem here is the liberal mentality. Faced with a problem such as obesity, the liberal wants to classify it as a public health problem — which is absurd on the face of it. No doubt there are
public health problems, and some of them are getting worse because of a failure to control the borders; but obesity is an individual problem to be solved (or left unsolved) by the individual and perhaps a few significant others. If obesity counts as a public health problem, then how could any health problem not count as a public health problem?

You can see from this example the totalitarian nature of the Left: it would intrude itself into every aspect of your life.  If you let them expand their control of the health care system, they will not rest until they have total control.  Power, as Nietzsche understood, does not seek merely to maintain itself but always to expand itself.  And then the powers that be  will have an ever-expanding rationale for dictating behavior.  Ride a motorcycle?  Then you must not only wear a helmet, but a full-face helmet.  After all, it's for your own good, and since the government pays the bills, they can justify such limitations on liberty on the ground of keeping medical costs down.  Eat red meat? The government might not ban it, but they could very easily slap a sort of 'sin' tax on its consumption.  The more socialized the health care delivery system, the more justification for such behavior-modifying disincentives and incentives.  And so on for any number of activities and dietary preferences. 

The liberal cannot imagine a solution to a problem that does not involve an expansion of the power and intrusiveness of government and a concomitant restriction of the liberty of the individual.

Here is the straight skinny on obesity: if you consume more calories than you burn, then you gain weight. If you burn more calories than you consume, then you lose weight. So if you want to lose weight, eat less and move more. Try it. It works. Of course there are people with special conditions. But I'm talking about the general run of the population. For the most part, people are fat because they refuse to discipline themselves. Liberals aid and abet them in their indiscipline. I am tempted to say that that is part of the very definition of a liberal. The liberal tendency is to shift responsibility from the agent and displace it onto factors external to the agent. So it's Burger King's fault that you have clogged arteries, not your fault.

The problem with liberals is not that they are stupid, but thay they stupefy themselves with their political correctness. The profiling question is a good example of this. Anyone with common sense can see that profiling is an effective and morally acceptable means of both preventing crimes and apprehending criminals once crimes have been committed. But the liberal tendency is to oppose it. Since these opponents don't have a logical leg to stand on, one is justified in psychologizing them.

But I'll leave that for later.

General Petraeus, the Koran, and Political Correctness in the Military

Here is General Petraeus' condemnation of the burning by a Florida pastor of the Koran.  And here is some excellent commentary by Andrew C. McCarthy.  Excerpt (emphasis added):

Down at Gitmo, the Defense Department gives the Koran to each of the terrorists even though DoD knows they interpret it (not without reason) to command them to kill the people who gave it to them. To underscore our precious sensitivity to Muslims, standard procedure calls for the the book to be handled only by Muslim military personnel. Sometimes, though, that is not possible for various reasons. If, as a last resort, one of our non-Muslim troops must handle or transport the book, he must wear white gloves, and he is further instructed primarily to use the right hand (indulging Muslim culture’s taboo about the sinister left hand). The book is to be conveyed to the prisoners in a “reverent manner” inside a “clean dry towel.” This is a nod to Islamic teaching that infidels are so low a form of life that they should not be touched (as Ayatollah Ali Sistani teaches, non-Muslims are “considered in the same category as urine, feces, semen, dead bodies, blood, dogs, pigs, alcoholic liquors,” and “the sweat of an animal who persistently eats [unclean things].”

This is every bit as indecent as torching the Koran, implicitly endorsing as it does the very dehumanization of non-Muslims that leads to terrorism. Furthermore, there is hypocrisy to consider: the Defense Department now piously condemning Koran burning is the same Defense Department that itself did not give a second thought to confiscating and burning bibles in Afghanistan.

Quite consciously, U.S. commanders ordered this purge in deference to sharia proscriptions against the proselytism of faiths other than Islam. And as General Petraeus well knows, his chain of command is not the only one destroying bibles. Non-Muslim religious artifacts, including bibles, are torched or otherwise destroyed in Islamic countries every single day as a matter of standard operating procedure. (See, e.g., my 2007 post on Saudi government guidelines that prohibit Jews and Christians from bringing bibles, crucifixes, Stars of David, etc., into the country — and, of course, not just non-Muslim accessories but non-Muslim people are barred from entering Mecca and most of Medina, based on the classical interpretation of an injunction found in what Petraeus is fond of calling the Holy Qur’an (sura 9:28: “Truly the pagans are unclean . . . so let them not . . . approach the sacred mosque”).

I don’t like book burning either, but I think there are different kinds of book burnings. One is done for purposes of censorship — the attempt to purge the world of every copy of a book to make it as if the sentiments expressed never existed. A good modern example is Cambridge University Press’s shameful pulping of all known copies of Alms for Jihad (see Stanley’s 2007 post on that). The other kind of burning is done as symbolic condemnation. That’s what I think Terry Jones was doing. He knows he doesn’t have the ability to purge the Koran from the world, and he wasn’t trying to. He was trying to condemn some of the ideas that are in it — or maybe he really thinks the whole thing is condemnable.

This is a particularly aggressive and vivid way to express disdain, but I don’t know that it is much different in principle from orally condemning some of the Koran’s suras and verses. Sura 9 of the Koran, for example, states the supremacist doctrine that commands Muslims to kill and conquer non-Muslims (e.g., 9:5: “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war) . . .”; 9:29: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the last day, nor hold forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth, from among the people of the Book [i.e., the Jews and Christians], until they pay the jizya [i.e., the tax paid for the privilege of living as dhimmis under the protection of the sharia state] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued”). I must say, I’ve got a much bigger problem with the people trying to comply with those commands than with the guy who burns them.

Every Generation Faces a Barbarian Threat in its 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 in a world that is (and must remain) forever imperfect. The refusal to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age.

“The Tit of the State”: Krauthammer Versus NPR’s Totenberg

Here.  "If the product is so superior, why does it have to live on the tit of the State?"

One answer is that the booboisie  of these United States is too backward and benighted to appreciate the high level of NPR programming.  The rubes of fly-over country are too much enamoured of wrestling, tractor pulls, and reality shows, and, to be blunt, too stupid and lazy to take in superior product.

Being something of an elitist myself, I am sympathetic to this answer.  The problem for me is twofold.  NPR is run by lefties for lefties.  That in itself is not a problem.  But it is a most serious problem when part of the funding comes from the taxpayer.  But lefties, blind to their own bias, don't see the problem.  Very simply, it is wrong to take money by force from people and then use it to promote causes that those people find offensive or worse when the causes have nothing to do with the legitimate functions of government.  Planned Parenthood and abortion.  NEA and "Piss Christ."  Get it?

Second, we are in fiscal crisis.  If we can't remove NPR from the "tit of the State," from the milky mammaries of massive Mama Obama government, what outfit can we remove from said mammaries? If we can't zero out  NPR how are we going to cut back on the 'entitlement' programs such as Social Security?

Don't get me wrong.  I like "Car Talk" despite the paucity of automotive advice and the excess of joking around.  I even like the PBS "Keeping Up Appearances" in small doses.  But if frivolous flab like this can't be excised, what can?

 

Muslim Groups Fomenting Hysteria over Rep. Pete King Hearings

Brace yourself for the crapload of liberal-left blather sure to inundate us  over the 'McCarthyism' of the Pete King investigation.  Hats off to Pete King, a true profile in courage, who stands up to militant Islam and its liberal-left enablers.  Here is Steven Emerson, an expert commentator on these matters (emphasis added):

The line of attack is now familiar: If King (R-L.I.) were truly interested in violent extremism, his hearings would focus on a wide range of groups that wreak havoc on America, including neo-Nazis and others; by focusing solely on Muslim extremism, the argument goes, he is betraying his bias.

This is utterly ridiculous. Our organization, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, recently did an analysis of all terrorism convictions based on statistics released by the Justice Department. These stats show that more than 80% of all convictions tied to international terrorist groups and homegrown terrorism since 9/11 involve defendants driven by a radical Islamist agenda. Though Muslims represent less than 1% of the American population, they constitute defendants in 186 of the 228 cases the Justice Department lists.

The figures confirm that there is a disproportionate problem of Islamic militancy and terrorism among the American Muslim population.

Read it all!  And political correctness be damned. 

Liberal-Left Bias Among the Social Psychologists

Here.  Excerpts, with emphases and a couple of comments by MavPhil.

Let's look at the 3 very liberal social sciences: anthropology, sociology, and psychology. These 3 fields have always leaned left, but things really changed in the 1960s. The civil rights struggle, the brutality inflicted upon peaceful marchers, the Viet Nam war, the assassinations of black leaders… Racial injustice in America was overwhelming, highly visible, and for many people, revolting. The generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s was profoundly shaped by these experiences. 

Continue reading “Liberal-Left Bias Among the Social Psychologists”

‘Booty’ and ‘Holocaust’ to be Removed from New Edition of Bible

Did they take the word 'ass' out too?  Or has that word already been removed?  Leave it to a liberal jackass to pander to the dumbest among us. 

We conservatives need to gird our loins, saddle our asses and and sally forth to smite these change-for-the-sake-of-change jackwagons, planting our boots in their 'booties' as needed.  (Figuratively speaking, of course.)

Toleration of Vandalism and the Difference Between Conservatives and Liberals

I sometimes speak of the difference between conservatives and liberals as a 'planetary' one: conservatives and liberals 'live on different planets.'  This Dennis Prager column on graffiti and its toleration by the  tolerate-anything-except-common-sense-and-conservatives Left will help you understand the 'planetary' difference. 

Irreconcilable Differences

Accept that there are differences among people that are nonnegotiable and irreconcilable.  We are not all the same at bottom.  We do not all want the same things.  We are not equal physically or intellectually or morally or spiritually.  For example, bellicosity is as it were hard-wired into some.  They like fighting and marauding, raping and pillaging.  Don't make the mistake of projecting into others your attitudes and values.  That is a characteristic and lethal error of pacifists and others.

Do you value peace and reconciliation?  Do you aspire to live and let live?  Well, jihadis don't.  Are you kind and forgiving to the woman caught in adultery?  Well, a majority of Egyptians want the adulteress stoned to death.  Do you admire those who are reasonable and conciliatory?  Do you take such traits to be evidence of strength?  Well, a majority in the Middle East do not.  They takes such traits as evidence of weakness.