Category: Leftism and Political Correctness

Against Politically Correct Atheism

If contemporary Christianity and contemporary Islam are judged by their fruits, which is more conducive to human flourishing, or, if you think nothing good comes from religion, which is less conducive to human misery?  I hope you are clearheaded and unprejudiced enough to see that the religion of 'peace'  is far worse than Christianity, at least at present, if you think both are bad.

So why do so many contemporary atheists employ a double-standard?  Why is the full measure of their energy and vitriol reserved for Christianity?  Why the politically correct tip-toe dance around Islam?  Is it fear?  Is it like cops who go after jaywalkers to avoid confronting gangbangers?  Is it because most atheists are leftists and leftists are bred-in-the-bone PC-ers?

Check out this diatribe against politically correct atheism by Pat Condell. 

‘Guns on the Street’

It's a liberal phrase, a silly phrase, a phrase that aids and abets thoughtlessness. Liberals speak of the 'guns on the street' and of  getting them off the street. Now I've walked down many a street in
many a city in this world, but I have yet to see any guns on the street. But I have seen them in the hands of people. The liberal tendency is to blame the instrument not the agent. You hear this sort of thing all the time: Guns have killed X people in Y time. A gun can do no such thing. Do liberals know this? They must, but then why do they talk as if they don't? So maybe they don't know it.

I didn't leer at the girl, my eyeglasses did. I didn't insult my colleague, my tongue did. Tookie Williams is not responsible for brutal murders, society is. It's the same sort of nonsense.

Will Liberals Ever Retire the Race Card?

Why should they?  As good leftists, they believe the end justifies the means, and their shameless race-baiting is a means conducive to their ends.  It works.  That's why they do it.  They must at some level have an inkling of what vile people they are to employ such a  shabby tactic, but whatever sense of moral decency is left in them is quickly smothered by their lust to win at all costs.

And it is indeed a well-rehearsed tactic which amounts to collusion on the part of liberal-left journalists and others to smear conservatives.  This from the Christian Science Monitor:

When conservatives were criticizing Mr. Obama for his connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in 2008, some JournoList members discussed a counterstrategy.

The Daily Caller writes that Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent, "urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama's relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama's conservative critics, Mr. Ackerman wrote, 'Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists.' "

See also Thomas Sowell's Race Card Fraud.  Excerpt:

The latest attack on the Tea Party movement, by Ben Jealous of the NAACP, has once again played the race card. Like the proverbial lawyer who knows his case is weak, he shouts louder.

This is not the first time that an organization with an honorable and historic mission has eventually degenerated into a tawdry racket. But that an organization like the NAACP, after years of fighting against genuine racism, should now be playing the game of race card fraud is especially painful to see.

You should also read the posts in my Race category. There is plenty of documentation there of the race-baiting and scumbaggery which are the now the marks of contemporary Democrats, liberals, and leftists.

And you should do your bit to push back.  The next time some scumbag of a liberal calls you a racist for standing up for fiscal responsibility or the rule of law, say this:  You lie about us, we'll tell the truth about you.

On the Illicit Use of ‘By Definition’

What is wrong with the following sentence:  "Excellent health care is by definition redistributional"?  It is from a speech by Donald Berwick,  President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, speaking to a British audience about why he favors government-run health care.

I have no objection to someone arguing that health care ought to be redistributional.  Argue away, and good luck! But I object strenuously to an argumentative procedure whereby one proves that X is Y by illict importation of the predicate Y into the definition of X.  But that is exactly what Berwick is doing.  Obviously, it is no part of the definition of 'health care' or 'excellent health care' that it should be redistributional.  Similarly, it is no part of the definition of 'illegal alien' that illegal aliens are Hispanic.  It is true that most of them are, but it does not fall out of the definition.

This is the sort of intellectual slovenliness (or is it mendacity?) that one finds not only in leftists but also in Randians like Leonard Peikoff.  In one place, he defines 'existence' in such a way that nothing supernatural exists, and then triumphantly 'proves' that God cannot exist! See here.

This has all the advantages of theft over honest toil as Russell remarked in a different connection.

One more example.  Bill Maher was arguing with Bill O'Reilly one night on The O'Reilly Factor.  O'Reilly came out against wealth redistribution via taxation, to which Maher responded in effect that that is just what taxation is.  The benighted Maher apparently believes that taxation by definition is redistributional.  Now that is plainly idiotic: there is nothing in the nature of taxation to require that it redistribute wealth.  Taxation is the coercive taking of monies from citizens in order to fund the functions of government.  One can of course argue for progressive taxation and wealth redistribution via taxation.  But those are further ideas not contained in the very notion of taxation.

Leftists are intellectual cheaters.  They will try to bamboozle you.  Listen carefully when they bandy about phrases like 'by definition.'  Don't let yourself be fooled.

"But are Berwick, Peikoff, and Maher really trying to fool people, or are they merely confused?"  I don't know and it doesn''t matter.  The main thing is not to be taken in by their linguistic sleight-of-hand whether intentional or unintentional.

 

Dissecting Leftism and Jihad Watch

Leftism and Islamism are the two main threats we face.  (Sorry, Al, your global warming is about as much a threat to us as your marital cooling.)  Both threats are totalitarian and  the threat is 'synergistic' inasmuch as leftists tolerate and enable militant Islam, which is obviously inimical to their modus vivendi, all the while displaying the most vicious intolerance of Christianity which is little or no threat to them.  I develop this theme in What Explains the Hard Left's Toleration of Militant Islam?

To help you think clearly about these important matters, I recommend Dissecting Leftism and Jihad Watch.

John Pepples Wants a New Left

During our lazy float down the Rio Salado today, Mike Valle and I had a lot to talk about. He mentioned a new blog he had come across entitled I Want a New Left. The author, John Pepples, aims to develop a self-critical leftism.  Now, having read quickly through most of his posts, I am a bit puzzled by the same thing that puzzles Mike:  why does Pepples hang on to the 'leftism' label?

But labels aren't that important.  What is important are the issues and one's stances on them. On that score, conservatives like me and Mike share common ground with Pepples.  In his biographical statement he says that in college he majored in mathematics and took a lot of physics courses. "But this was during the late 60s and early 70s, when much questioning was occurring, and I ended up as a grad student in philosophy."  Sounds very familiar!  The 'sixties were a heady time, a time of ferment, during which indeed "much questioning was occurring."  I started out in Electrical Engineering but also "ended up as a grad student in philosophy."  I did, however, have a bit more luck career-wise and didn't experience the same difficulties getting into print.

Why did so many of us 60s types end up in philosophy?  Because we were lost in a strange land, traditional understandings and forms of world-orientation having left us without guidance, and we needed to ascend to a vantage point to reconnoiter the terrain, the vantage point that philosophy alone provides.

Political change, a species of the genus doxastic change, is a fascinating topic.  I recently stumbled upon an effort by a distaff blogger who documents her transition from a comfortable enclave of mutually reinforcing Democrats to the more open world of contemporary conservatism, and the hostility with which her turncoat behavior was rewarded.  She calls her blog Neo-Neocon.

NASA Then and Now

In the '60s, under the leadership of JFK, NASA put a man on the moon.  Forty years later, under the 'leadership' of BHO, 'NASA' has become an acronym for

Nurturing Arab Self Awareness.  (From an e-mailer to the O'Reilly Factor)  Image found here.

On second thought, the e-mailer's suggestion can be improved upon:  Nurturing Arab Self Acceptance.

As for the cartoon below, I needn't point out to my astute readership that the Arabs did not invent mathematics.

NASA

The Empty Suit Suit: U.S. vs. Arizona

The ridiculous lawsuit the DOJ is bringing against Arizona could be called the 'empty suit suit' inasmuch as  behind it are a bunch of empty suits in line behind the Empty Suit in Chief. See Lawrence Auster, The Gravamen of the DOJ's Case Against Arizona.

It is nice to know that not everything in The Arizona Republic, the local rag of record, is liberal-left buncombe.  See Chuck Coughlin, Secure Border Can Provide Big Dividends.  But the journalistic crapweasels of The AZ Republic really do deserve our contempt.  How many weeks did it take them before they began correctly reporting the content of S.B. 1070?  Like Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, and Obama, they apparently believed that one can speak responsibly about something about which one knows nothing.  But I do admit that the aforesaid journalistic crapweasels have cleaned up their act somewhat.  One wonders what goes on in the J-schools around the land.  I'm not sure I want to know.

While I'm on the illegal immigration topic, let me draw your attention to Heather Mac Donald's The Illegal Alien Crime Wave.  Here is but one of her astute observations:

But however pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much broader disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control over immigration policy. Fifty years ago, immigration policy might have driven immigration numbers, but today the numbers drive policy. The nonstop increase of immigration is reshaping the language and the law to dissolve any distinction between legal and illegal aliens and, ultimately, the very idea of national borders.

That's certainly right: the numbers now drive the policy.  And it may be  too late to stop the illegal immigrant juggernaut which is of course aided and abetted by the intellectually irresponsible elision of the legal/illegal distinction by its  liberal-left enablers.  

Best Evidence of the Greatness of This Country

Keith Burgess-Jackson writes:

The best evidence of the greatness of this country is that people are clamoring to get into it. Almost nobody—including self-loathing progressives—wants to leave it.

It is also the best evidence of the failure of Communism and those socio-political schemes that are ever on the slouch toward Communism.   They needed walls to keep people in, we need walls to keep them out.  Hence the rank absurdity of the comparsion of a wall on our southern border to the Berlin Wall.  Now the leftists who make this comparison cannot be so obtuse as not to see its rank absurdity.  But they make it anyway because they will say or do anything to win.  They are out for power any way they can get it.

By the way, this lust for power by any means explains the fascination of leftists with Nietzsche, a fascination which would otherwise be difficult to explain given the German's social and political views.  Nietzsche's fundamental ontological thesis is that the world is the will to power.  Die Welt is der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders!  And because reality at its base and core is blind will to power without rhyme or reason, whose only goal is its own expansion, there is no place for truth.  Truth gets reduced, and in consequence of the reduction eliminated, in favor of ever-shifting perspectives of ever-changing power centers.  Perspectivism, accordingly, is Nietzsche's central epistemological doctrine.  It is of course incoherent and easily refuted.  But why should that matter to someone who does not care about truth in the first place?  Truth is a conservative notion since it points us to the way things ARE.  But progressives take their marching orders from Karl Marx: "The philosophers have variously interpreted the wotrld; but the point is to change it." (11th Thesis on Feuerbach.)  Die Philosophen haben die Welt verschieden  interpretiert; aber es kommt darauf an, sie zu veraendern.

What in these two central Nietzschean doctrines is there for a leftist not to love?  He finds sanction in them  both for his pursuit of power unchecked by any moral standard ("The end justifies the means") and for his propaganda and deceitfulness.   If there is no truth there is no limit to what he can say and do in pursuit of his ends.

This also explains the leftist's  belief in the indefinite malleability of man and society. If there is no way things are, no rerum natura, then there is no limit on what is possible.  And if there is no moral world order, then there is no check on what it is morally permissible to do. And so the leftist, foolish idealist that he is, embarks upon schemes the upshot of which  are of the sort documented in the Black Book of Communism.  But if you break 100 million eggs and still have no omelet, then you need to go back and check your premises.  Or, to paraphrase Aristotle, a little error in the beginning leads to a big bloody one in the end.

 

Church, State, and Arizona SB 1070

E. J. Montini of the Arizona Republic reports that ". . . one of the lawsuits challenging SB 1070 is based on the notion that the law inhibits First Amendment freedom to worship."  As Montini correctly states, "Among other things, SB 1070 makes it a crime to knowingly transport, harbor, conceal or shield an illegal immigrant if you do so while committing a separate criminal offense."

This provision of the law will of course cause trouble for those pastors and other church members who transport illegals to and from church functions.  Suppose Pastor X is pulled over for a traffic violation while shuttling a group of illegals.  Said pastor is liable to prosecution under the 1070 law.  That is as it should be since the pastor is aiding and abetting the flouting of U. S. law.

But by what stretch of logic does one conclude that violators of U. S. immigration law are having their First Amendment rights violated?  They have no such rights!  Those are rights of U. S. citizens, not rights of anyone, citizen or not.  But even if you think that illegal aliens do have First Amendment rights, or some analogous universal human right, there is nothing in 1070 that prohibits the free exercise of religion on any reasonable construal of 'prohibit.'    The right to the free exercise of religion does not give one the right to do anything in the free exercise thereof.

Take a simple example.  Catholic priests cannot be prohibited by the state from saying mass.  To do so they need wine.  But there are laws against theft, so they need to come by their wine by some legal means.  Now suppose some benighted liberal argues that the laws against theft inhibit the First Amendment freedom to practice one's religion by prohibiting the stealing of wine and other supplies needed at mass.  Anyone can see that to argue in such a way would be a joke.  To take a more drastic case, suppose there is a Satanic ritual that requires the killing of cats.  No sane person could argue that the laws against cruelty to animals interfere with the First Amendment rights of satanists.

Similarly with 1070.  No rational person could argue that it inhibits First Amendment rights.  The right to practice one's religion does not give one the right to break laws in its practice.

Churchmen need to reflect carefully on their relation to the State.  If they flout its laws, and in so doing undermine the rule of law, then who will protect them when they need it?  Will the good pastors who aid and abet illegal aliens forego calling up the police when they need protection?  Will they try to have it both ways, deriving the benefits from the rule of law while undermining it?

Of Black Holes and Black Hos

Is 'black hole' code for black ho?  The NAACP seems to think so.  One wonders how many NAACP members could explain what a black hole is.  Hallmark caved and pulled the card.  Disgusting.  All decent people need to stand up against the politically correct lunacy of the race-baiting Left.

We've been around this block before.  For a fuller discussion see Of Black Holes and Political Correctness.

A Diversity Paradox for Immigration Expansionists

Liberals love 'diversity' even at the expense of such obvious goods as unity, assimilation, and comity.  So it is something  of a paradox that their refusal to take seriously the enforcement of immigration laws has led to a most undiverse stream of immigrants. "While espousing a fervent belief in diversity, immigrant advocates and their allies have presided over a policy regime that has produced one of the least diverse migration streams in our history." Here